You probably have heard about the Salesforce devOps center that came in Beta a few months ago and have been released as Generally Available (GA) this week!
If not, (I mean, if you were stuck in a cave without internet the last 6 months đ ) you may be interested in installing it: follow my tutorial by clicking on this link.
Now, you probably have this question in mind: what’s the future of Salesforce deployment? Can I get rid off Copado, Gearset, Autorabit?
And even if you didn’t move to devOps before, is devOps center going to definitely replace the changesets? Let’s see it
Salesforce devOps center vs changesets
Changesets is the good old fashioned way to deploy metadatas between Sandboxes in Salesforce.
It’s quite easy to use, but let’s admit it, when it comes to deploy a lot of metadatas for big projects, it’s just a total mess. Changesets are ok to deploy a few metadatas.
DevOps center is great because compared to changesets, it brings:
- Feature by feature easy deployment
- Tracability of what have been done and the status of a work item: where it has been deployed: on which sandbox
- Versionning, since every metadata retrieved in a Sandbox is directly commited to Github
- Possibility to merge work from several sandboxes thanks to Github
I think devOps center will for sure replace the changesets.
Changesets were ok to deploy a few metadatas, let’s say about 100, like validation rules, flows, layout, record type.
But if you have to sync the work of several developers, from several sandboxes, with different timelines to go live, changesets, let’s be honnest are a NIGHTMARE đ
Welcome devOps center ! (But take into account that you should invest in Github accounts for you and your team mates)
Salesforce devOps center vs Gearset
First of all, what is Gearset? Well, Gearset is a complete devOps solution, independent from Salesforce with a lot of features to help you on:
- Monitoring
- Deploying
- CI/CD
- Data migration between orgs
- Unit test runs and notifications in case of failure for example
- And many many more features, please check here : pricing of gearset
So, that said, should you drop Gearset licences and move to devOps center?
Well… if you’re using Gearset only for deployment, maybe…
But if you’re using Gearset only for deployment, you’re using only a very few part of the product.
I mean Salesforce devOps center will not provide you a lot of cool features that Gearset brings like:
- Compare two orgs
- Prepare your deployment with continuous integration
- Cherry picking deployment from Github
At this step, and from what I have seen when testing the Salesforce devOps center, it’s more like a V2 version of the Changesets, with more tracability and have a clear vision of the previously deployed features (and on which Sandbox)
Deployment is a very big topic on Salesforce. Devops center, for sure was needed, but unfortunately it will not only a few part of the deploys, but products like Gearset provide a lot lot lot MORE than devOps center to help you guys: Product managers, Architects, Platform managers, Dev leaders to help you monitor your platform in terms of tests, deploy, data, and configuration.
So maybe use both in parallels? Or use devOps center only if you don’t deal with a lot of work in your Salesforce org…