6 Ways to Leverage Salesforce CI/CD for Scalability and Efficiency
Salesforce CI/CD tools are a critical aspect of expanding the capacity of your DevOps team to create reliable, secure products in a timely fashion.
Why It Matters: Your organization is going to expand and your DevOps processes need to be able to keep pace. Effectively scaling your DevOps processes takes preparation and strict attention to detail.
- On average, businesses aim to grow their operations by 10% to 25% each year.
- Increasing the scale of operations without increasing your workforce makes it much harder to reliably achieve quality and security goals.
Here are 6 ways Salesforce CI/CD tools can help support scalability and efficiency in your organization:
- Integration with Version Control
- Reduction of Manual Processes
- Sandbox Management
- Incremental Deployments
- Analysis of Performance
- Governance Definitions and Verification
1. Integration with Version Control
Collaboration is a major part of highlighting efficiency within your Salesforce DevOps pipeline. However, code overwrites or mismanaged changes are major challenges when working with a large team.
Integrating your CI/CD processes with a version control system allows for reliable collaboration and provides a single source of truth for all changes.
Salesforce CI/CD tools like ARM enable the integration of version control so you have the framework necessary to reliably scale your team’s efforts.
2. Reduction of Manual Processes
Your team members are your greatest asset. It might sound counterintuitive, but the best way to support them is by sourcing automated tools. Leveraging automation takes time-consuming, monotonous tasks off their hands so they can focus on more pressing matters.
Automated CI/CD tools address repetitive testing tasks to expedite the completion of these processes while expanding the capacity of your team.
These tools won’t get fatigued, so you can be sure the last line of code gets the same level of attention as the first.
3. Sandbox Management
The prevalence of working remotely is only going to expand in the future, so you need to have the tools in place to reliably produce secure products. Version control is one aspect of working with a large team over a varied geographic area.
Sandbox management helps teams easily synchronize the efforts of their developers without risking the stability of the main repository.
The creation, refreshing, and deletion of development, testing, and staging environments can all be automated as part of the CI/CD strategy. This ensures consistency across your environments.
4. Incremental Deployments
A quality CI/CD tool enables your team to produce smaller, incremental deployments of coding updates instead of deploying an entire project at once. This is much more manageable and makes it easier to control the quality of your release.
Incremental deployments are a DevOps best practice and made possible with customizable CI/CD tools.
This practice also allows you to only push changed components within an application when making an update, instead of deploying the entire codebase.
5. Analysis of Performance
Continuous improvement means taking an honest look at your processes. Are there any bottlenecks? Are there any problem areas that frequently create errors? Finding these areas in need of improvement is the first step to streamlining operations and increasing efficiency.
CI/CD tools create reports and dashboards with useful metrics like deployment success rates that show which aspects of the application life cycle need improvement.
Scaling operations becomes much easier when you minimize disruptions in the pipeline.
6. Governance and Compliance Verification
Data security is important for every organization, but the requirements are much more clearly defined for regulated industries. The types of protection measures put in place, the length of time you can store data, who has access to certain types of data—all of these considerations can factor into your compliance status depending on the specifics of your business.
Governance and compliance checks can be integrated into your CI/CD pipeline through automated policy scanners that enforce coding standards, security policies, and regulatory requirements.
The steps you take today will impact your readiness for scaling operations in the future. Leveraging your Salesforce CI/CD tools to promote collaboration, quality, and security will give you the support you need to achieve your goals.
Next Step…
We see real-world examples of the benefits listed above every day. Our Salesforce CI/CD tools help organizations achieve—even exceed—their release timelines without sacrificing security requirements.
Check out this case study to learn how a healthcare provider was able to release a critical application six months sooner than they originally expected.
FAQs
Do CI/CD tools support data security?
It’s easy to think of things like multi-factor authentication or data backups when considering data security, but CI/CD tools also play a huge role in securing Salesforce data. These tools automate critical tasks that were previously performed manually, such as testing and integration. When conducted manually, errors are likely to occur, which means bugs appear in live environments. These misfires threaten data through exposure or corruption. CI/CD tools ensure these tasks are performed flawlessly, eliminating these potentially damaging mistakes. This results in more secure, reliable, and expedited integration and deployment processes that support a successful data security strategy.
Are there any challenges teams face when getting started with new automated DevOps tools?
There’s always going to be a learning curve when implementing new tools. DevOps teams grow accustomed to current practices so it may take some time to break them out of old habits. It will also take a little time to learn the functionality of a new tool, but putting in the effort to thoroughly understand its features ensures your team will see the greatest benefits possible. Workflows will need to be updated to account for new functionality. Existing tools will need to be verified for compatibility with updated tools. The best way to navigate these challenges is to ensure lines of communication are open so people can get the answers they need when problems arise.
What’s the best thing I can do to set myself up for future expansion of DevOps efforts?
In a single word: automation. Implementing automated CI/CD tools wherever possible will set you up for increased productivity with a focus on repeatable, high-quality processes. A strong foundation built on collaboration, automation, and continuous improvement will provide the support you need to confidently expand your scope of work. Alongside an increase in automation, you will also need to expand your training program. Continuous improvement in your team’s skills ensures they have the knowledge needed to get the most from your tools and create consistent products in a secure, reliable way.
