Salesforce DevOps Centre is coming in 2021 !

Product Basics

• What is DevOps Center?

DevOps Center is a new Salesforce product, announced in June 2020, that will provide a full end-to-end experience allowing teams of declarative developers, admins, and programmatic developers to work together to build and deliver software applications using modern best practices around Change and Release Management and DevOps. DevOps Center is a UI-based application that will allow you to manage environments, easily track changes and work to be done, seamlessly integrate with source control systems, and manage deployments through an easy-to-use click-based interface.

• When will DevOps Center be released?

Salesforce are currently running a limited (capacity reached) Pilot in spring 2021, folloSalesforced by a Beta in summer timeframe. Salesforce are currently targeting a GA release early 2022.

• Will DevOps Center be a paid add-on or will it be free?

Salesforce will offer a free and paid offering. Pricing and packaging are TBD.

• How will DevOps Center be delivered?

DevOps Center will be delivered as a Managed Package and will be installed into a production DevHub org. It can then be connected to any Sandboxes, Scratch Orgs, and Production Orgs to do development and deploy changes.

• Is DevOps Center what was referred to at last year’s Dreamforce as ALM Center?

Yes

• What is the future for Change Sets now that DevOps Center is coming?

The DevOps Center is meant to subsume the functionality provided currently by Change Sets. Salesforce don’t have immediate plans to retire Change Sets, but once Salesforce have reached functional parity betSalesforceen DevOps Center and Change Sets Salesforce will look at possible retirement strategies, and Salesforce will communicate that clearly and with plenty of advance notice to our community. Salesforce are not planning to further enhance Change Sets at this point.

Product Integrations

• What source control tools (VCS) will DevOps Center integrate with?

Salesforce will first integrate with GitHub, and have plans to also support Bitbucket, Azure DevOps Git, GitLab, and other 3rd party VCS providers. Stay tuned for more information on which tools and projected schedule.

• Do I need to use a VCS tool with the DevOps Center?

Yes, as source control is central to the DevOps Center experience, it is required that you use a version control system.

• What if I don’t currently use a VCS tool?

GitHub, Bitbucket, GitLab are easy to sign up with and have free plans!

• Will DevOps Center integrate with 3rd party CI/CD tools?

Yes, DevOps Center will integrate with 3rd party CI/CD tools. Stay tuned for more information on which tools and projected schedule.

• Will DevOps Center integrate with agile work tracking tools like JIRA or Agile Accelerator?

Yes, DevOps Center will provide integration to existing work tracking tools. Stay tuned for more information on which tools and projected schedule.

• Will DevOps Center work with GitHub Enterprise or other internal VCS servers?

Salesforce’ll be initially focusing on public services such as GitHub, Bitbucket, GitLab, but as Salesforce know that some customers have internal VCS servers Salesforce will consider implementations there as Salesforcell. Internal source repositories have different levels of security policies so Salesforce would need to work more closely to understand the path forward. If you are using this kind of implementation and are interested in using DevOps Center Salesforce’d be interested to talk with you more to understand your setup and security policies.

Product Functionality

• Will I be able to deploy changes directly from the DevOps Center?

Yes, you will be able to configure a “pipeline” of test sandboxes and production orgs and manage deployments directly from within DevOps Center.

• Does DevOps Center utilize the SourceMember object to track the changes? If so, does it mean that SourceMember is going to be available in sandboxes?

Yes, the DevOps Center uses the same “source tracking” mechanisms that SFDX uses to track changes. In Summer ‘20, this Source Tracking feature using Source Member object is available in Sandboxes as an open beta, please see https://releasenotes.docs.salesforce.com/en-us/summer20/release-notes/rn_sandboxes_source_tracking.htm.

• What happens if multiple users are making changes in the same sandbox and I pull changes from the sandbox via the DevOps Center? Do all changes get pulled, or just the ones I made?

Salesforce recommend that each developer use their own development sandbox, but understand that some teams do share sandboxes. In this case, the tool will pull all changes that Salesforcere made since the last time you pulled changes, regardless of who made the change. There is a field in the UI that shows who made the last change to the component, so you can use that to determine if you want to include/migrate each component based on that.

• Does DevOps Center support development with Scratch Orgs or 2nd Generation Packaging?

The first release of DevOps Center will be targeted at an “org-based development model”, where development is typically done in Developer Sandboxes, and arbitrary sets of changes are moved from one environment to the next. In a subsequent release, Salesforce will also support a “package-based development model”, where development is done in Scratch Orgs, and source is packaged into modularized and independent “Packages” which are then installed into downstream environments. All this said, if you have Scratch Orgs where you’re doing your development, you can in fact connect them to DevOps Center to use as your development environment, even in the first release.