Salesforce made generally available today a low-code DevOps Center service on its infrastructure through which developers are provided an opinionated platform for building custom applications. The Salesforce DevOps Center service is based on the same object model Salesforce uses to construct its own applications.
Karen Fidelak, senior director of product management at Salesforce, said after nearly two years of development effort, this platform will make it simpler for both professional and citizen developers to build applications consistently using a common Source Control repository. That’s especially critical for professional developers that may need to access source code previously created by a citizen developer, Fidelak noted.
In 2023, Salesforce will embed more robust continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) capabilities within the platform to make it simpler to deploy custom applications on the Salesforce platform, Fidelak added.
In general, the number of developers willing to embrace DevOps best practices to build Salesforce applications has been surprising, since the platform was initially launched in 2020, noted Fidelak. She noted that both citizen and professional developers are looking to adopt best practices that provide a set of guardrails that ensure high-quality applications are secure. Salesforce anticipated a much higher level of DevOps resistance, added Fidelak.
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 Flows, a set of process management tools the company provides. As development teams make changes in their sandboxes, DevOps Center automatically tracks them. Developers can then point and click to promote their desired metadata components via custom pipelines they define.
In addition, Salesforce also provides optional integrations with version control systems such as GitHub to centralize the management and governance of artifacts.
Finally, Salesforce is committing to tightening integration between DevOps Center and multiple software-as-as-service applications such as Tableau and middleware platforms such as Mulesoft, said Fidelak.
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 issue that creates is citizen developers typically don’t have the expertise required to build and deploy secure applications at scale—at least not applications that anybody other than themselves really wants to use. Ideally, citizen developers should be supported by application development platforms and DevOps teams that ensure security guardrails are in place for building applications at scale. DevOps teams should also reduce the friction that a citizen developer will most certainly encounter when building any application.
The fact is, in the absence of that support, most citizen developers—who typically have other tasks that require their attention—will simply abandon an application development project should projects become overly complicated. None of this means organizations shouldn’t be working toward building their own army of citizen developers. The increased reliance on citizen developers is part of an inexorable wave of the democratization of IT. The challenge is making sure those applications are of the highest quality possible regardless of who actually developed them.
