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Salesforce today made available a low-code DevOps Center service on its infrastructure that provides developers with a platform to build custom applications. Salesforce DevOps Center is based on the same object model that Salesforce uses to build its own applications.
Karen Fidelak, senior director of product management at Salesforce, said after nearly two years of development efforts, the platform will make it easier for both professional and civilian developers to build applications consistently using a shared repository for source control. That’s especially critical for professional developers who may need to access source code previously created by a civilian developer, Fidelak noted.
In 2023, Salesforce will build more robust continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) capabilities into the platform to make it easier to deploy custom applications on the Salesforce platform, Fidelak added.
Overall, the number of developers willing to embrace DevOps best practices for building Salesforce apps was surprising, since the platform originally launched in 2020, Fidelak noted. She noted that both citizens and professional developers want to adopt best practices that provide a set of guardrails that ensure secure, high-quality applications. Salesforce expected a much higher level of DevOps resilience, Fidelak added.
The DevOps Center platform enables development teams to track and deploy changes to custom objects on the Salesforce platform as work items that can be integrated with other Salesforce workflows, a set of company-provided process management tools. As development teams make changes in their sandboxes, DevOps Center tracks them automatically. Developers can then point and click to promote their desired metadata components through custom pipelines they define.
In addition, Salesforce also provides optional integrations with version control systems such as GitHub to centralize artifact management and governance.
Finally, Salesforce is committed to tightening integration between the DevOps Center and more software-as-a-service applications like Tableau and middleware platforms like Mulesoft, Fidelak said.
It’s not clear how much low-code is moving through DevOps pipelines these days, but the volume is increasing as more developers rely on these tools to accelerate application development. The problem it creates is that citizen developers typically don’t have the expertise needed to build and deploy secure apps at scale — at least not apps that anyone but themselves actually wants to use. Ideally, citizen developers should have the support of application development platforms and DevOps teams that ensure security fences are in place for building applications at scale. DevOps teams also need to reduce the friction that a citizen developer is bound to encounter when building any application.
The fact is, in the absence of that support, most citizen developers—who usually have other tasks that demand their attention—will simply abandon an app development project if the projects become too complicated. None of this is to say that organizations shouldn’t work to build their own army of citizen developers. The increased reliance on citizen developers is part of an inexorable wave of IT democratization. The challenge is to ensure that those applications are of the highest possible quality regardless of who actually developed them.
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