Staying on top of new trends, tools, and practices related to automated release management helps teams stay safe and productive in the face of growing challenges.
Why It Matters: Automated release management is an essential aspect of an optimized Salesforce DevOps pipeline. Falling behind on technology and best practices makes it more difficult for an organization to remain secure while competing in the marketplace.
- Outdated IT infrastructure is more easily breached by cybercriminals.
- Dashboards and metrics won’t provide the necessary insight if they aren’t capable of tracking relevant data.
- Slower release processes make it more difficult for an organization to respond to emerging data security threats in a reasonable amount of time.
Here are 10 ways automated release management is advancing in 2023:
1. AI Predictive Analytics
Machine learning has become a huge topic lately, and this is transferring over to automated release management. It involves analyzing historical data to identify patterns, relationships, and trends to anticipate future outcomes.
Predictive analytics can be used to analyze data and make predictions about future trends and events such as risk assessments, customer behavior, and fraud detection.
Predictive analytics plays an important role in automated release management by foreseeing potential issues that could arise during the release process, as well as identifying opportunities for optimization and improvement
2. Further Reliance on Cloud Computing
The pandemic put remote work on the fast track. This continues to have repercussions as we move further into 2023. Geographically disparate teams need to be able to communicate and collaborate, which has pushed cloud computing to the forefront of IT infrastructures.
Incorporating cloud-based release management tools and testing infrastructure are crucial aspects of Salesforce DevOps for many companies, which will continue to grow in importance.
Organizations need to continually improve their release processes to deliver high-quality software updates and features to their users more quickly and efficiently. Cloud computing and dedicated DevOps tools are essential for accomplishing this.
3. Containerization Technology
Containerization refers to the practice of running applications in isolated, self-contained environments called containers. Each container provides a complete runtime environment, including the application code, dependencies, and configuration files, but does not include the underlying operating system.
Containerization technology provides a standardized environment for deploying and testing software, which helps release managers identify issues earlier in the release process.
These capabilities benefit the automated release management process by enabling faster deployments, increased scalability, and improved compatibility. Containerization is going to be increasingly utilized in automated release management in 2023.
4. Improved Automation
Automated tools that enable faster and more secure release management practices will continue to be optimized throughout the year. Security patches, increased reliance on artificial intelligence, and cloud-based functionalities are all going to be a focus for application developers.
Organizations can further enhance the automation capabilities of their release management tools by incorporating new technologies such as AI and cloud computing.
Automated release management solutions will continue to evolve towards providing end-to-end automation of the entire release process, from code development to deployment. This will involve integrating with other tools and processes, such as static code analysis, continuous integration and continuous development or CI/CD, and more.
5. Greater Visibility
You can’t fix a problem if you don’t know it exists. Failing to have an updated view of the inner workings of your Salesforce DevOps pipeline has the potential to lead to costly outages. Salesforce security posture management toolsempower admins to maintain visibility of essential functions like team member permissions settings and compliance factors.
Automated checks of Salesforce profile and permissions settings eliminate the threat of overexposed data, making companies much less likely to experience data exposures, corruptions, and deletions.
Employees should only have access to the data they need to accomplish their tasks. Anything beyond that opens up data sets to an increased possibility of costly accidents.
6. Microservice Architecture
Microservice architecture breaks down a complex application into smaller, independent services that can be developed, deployed, and scaled independently of one another. Each service is responsible for a specific business function and communicates with other services through APIs.
Automated release management in a microservice architecture manages the deployment of individual services, as well as the orchestration of multiple services, to create a complete application.
This approach focuses more on specific tasks, which allows developers to work on individual services without impacting other parts of the application. This makes it easier to incorporate changes and add new features without disrupting the entire application.
7. Insistence on DevSecOps
Data security is always a concern, but as we’ve seen from recent White House cybersecurity guidelines, strict control is increasingly important. The software development lifecycle is an important aspect of maintaining a secure approach, but the time has come to move to the next evolution of DevOps practices: DevSecOps.
DevSecOps integrates data security considerations into every step of the release management pipeline.
Automated testing and scanning tools can be leveraged to prevent data security vulnerabilities and seek out ones that already exist. This approach is no longer optional, but a necessity.
8. Streamlined Feedback Loops
Feedback is an essential aspect of refining and optimizing DevOps processes. This feedback can come from team members, end users, or dashboards and reports from automated release management tools. These insights can be leveraged to create stronger products that better serve customers.
By continuously collecting feedback at each stage of the development pipeline, the release management team can quickly identify and address any issues or bugs, reducing the time it takes to deliver a high-quality release.
The feedback loop also helps ensure any changes or updates are properly tested before being released, reducing the risk of introducing new issues into the production environment.
9. Anomaly Detection
Anomaly detection refers to the process of identifying unexpected behavior in the DevOps pipeline. Machine learning is used to analyze data and identify unusual patterns or trends.
Automated release management tools often collect large amounts of data, including metrics related to code changes, build times, test results, and deployment success rates. Anomaly detection algorithms can be applied to this data to identify patterns that may indicate a problem.
For example, an anomaly detection algorithm might identify a sudden increase in the number of failed tests, which could indicate a problem with a recent code change. This improves the overall quality of the release process and safeguards against bugs or other issues in the production environment.
10. Increased Collaboration Across Teams
DevSecOps relies on strong communication among every team in the development pipeline. Security teams, development teams, administrators—everybody needs to be on the same page and have the ability to raise a red flag if they see something wrong.
Automated release management tools are increasingly integrating with communication platforms like Microsoft Teams to keep everyone working on a project up-to-date and apprised of key milestones.
Having everyone on the same page reduces confusion. Bugs and errors are much less likely to occur when multiple rounds of automated testing check every commit, and all team members are aware of important changes
Next Step…
Now that you know what to expect from automated release management this year, let’s look into how to incorporate these capabilities into your Salesforce DevOps pipeline.
Check out our blog, “10 Tips for DevOps Implementation for Salesforce,” to learn more.