Our first webinar is now complete, and we're already planning our next webinar on GitHub for Salesforce DevOps later this month.
If you missed our first two-part webinar on Salesforce ISV DevOps, don't worry! You can catch up on the recordings, review the slide deck, and learn about the key concepts presented here.
The webinar was divided into two 1-hour sessions on January 23 and January 30
- Part 1: Concepts and Theory: Introducing the common challenges ISVs face with the DX Silo Effect and introducing the Product Delivery Model as the solution
- Part 2: Tooling and Process: Applying the Product Delivery Model in practice with CumulusCI and D2X to create a comprehensive Development-to-Delivery lifecycle
Each session also featured questions from the audience at the end covering a variety of related topics including MetaDeploy and scratch org snapshots.
Part 1: Concepts and Theory
Through over a decade experience working at and with some of the platform's largest scale ISVs, we've found a common disconnect that is the root of most DevOps challenges ISVs face. And DevOps challenges aren't just about making developers more productive or reducing bugs, they impact the entire business.
The challenge is what we refer to as the DX Silo Effect and it has a particularly strong impact on anyone building composable products on Salesforce like ISVs. The DX Silo Effect occurs because of a disconnect between what's in version control, the package source, and what it takes to fully test, demo, or use the product in an org. Without that gap automated in version control, there's a mismatch between sources of truth between product development (package source in version control) and the rest of the business (QA/Demo/TSO orgs).
We introduce the solution, the Product Delivery Model, which "defines a product as an automation recipe in version control used throughout the product lifecycle to deliver complete product experiences to new or existing orgs". With this different definition, the DevOps goal of breaking down siloes between development, operations, and the rest of the business becomes possible because version control represents the source of truth for all stakeholders.
Check out the video:
Part 2: Tooling and Process
Concepts and theory are great, but how do you actually apply the Product Delivery Model in practice? This session examines the existing open source tools CumulusCI and MuseLab's own D2X to show how the Product Delivery Model is easy to set up, efficient to operate, and extensible enough to handle automating the most complex org setup recipes.
We start with a bit of theory about tooling focused on the difference between to establish a criteria on which to approach tooling evaluation:
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Scripts accomplish a specific task in a specific context for operator
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Tools accomplish a set of tasks in various contexts for skilled users
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Products automate and monitor repeatable processes for all stakeholders
MuseLab's open source D2X framework and our free D2X Launchpad web app make it simple to start a new project with the same best practices we help our clients setup in our consulting services. We show a simple demo of building a new 2GP managed extension package project on GitHub preconfigured with CumulusCI and low-maintenance GitHub Actions workflows for CI and release operations.
Then we delve into an introduction to CumulusCI and how it is uniquely suited to create repeatable and scalable DevOps pipelines and infrastructure across many different module repositories. CumulusCI provides a common interface for DevOps operations across projects while providing each project with the extensibility to override and extend its operations to adapt to the project's needs, all through a simple YAML format in cumulusci.yml.
The MuseLab ISV D2X North Star provides a vision for the ideally optimized ISV Development-to-Delivery Experience (D2X). This comprehensive process is designed for optimal scalability from all angles (team size, product complexity, customer size, implementation complexity, etc) and be fully compliant and secure by leveraging industry standard best practices and infrastructure like GitHub.
Finally, we provide a glimpse into the future with the vision for MuseLab's upcoming product, D2X Cloud, an API-First approach to Salesforce DevOps enables portability of CumulusCI automation to anywhere that can call a REST API. With the project's automation from GitHub available to integrate anywhere, Salesforce DevOps can finally meet each audience where they already do their work and optimize for their needs.
Check out the video:
Slide Deck
Want to go deeper? Check out the Google Slides deck for the webinar. There's a ton of resources and links throughout the slide deck to more information.
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