The differences between DevOps for Salesforce and other tech stacks

Applying DevOps in Salesforce is different from other environments; let's look at this step by step.

First, we will talk about the development process. Salesforce development is easy to start with because you don't need any installations and extra setup on your development machines. All you need is an internet connection and a browser supported by Salesforce platforms, such as Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Safari, and so on. As we demonstrated in the previous chapter, a sample application in Salesforce is easy to develop with some clicks as Salesforce provides some existing applications and tabs for you to reuse. We can create some custom tabs in our application according to our requirements. When it comes to other tech stacks such as Java, to get started with development we need to install Java on our machines and set up some environment variables.

In tech stacks such as Java, JavaScript, PHP, and Ruby, the most common thing is using version control systems such as Git, CVS, SVN, and so on, which help to keep track of application changes done by each developer. Version control systems make it possible for multiple developers to work on a single project or module without overwriting each other's changes. In some situations, such as when something goes wrong and unfortunately we need to roll back updates, version control is very useful.

When we have a small team of one or two developers working on a Salesforce application, we may not need to use version control. But when it comes to teams with multiple developers working on different sandboxes, developing different features releasing at different timelines or sprints, it becomes necessary to have version control for a streamlined development and delivery process.

There are some ways to deploy changes to Salesforce production organizations, such as using Change Set, Eclipse, and Ant. For deployment using Change Set, you need to connect organizations using Deployment Connection. Eclipse uses metadata for deployment and it is mostly used by developers. Using Ant for deployment, we can perform file-based deployment to production organizations.