Salesforce DevOps Services

Automate your Salesforce release management activities with seamless end-to-end visibility.

Our DevOps services are perfect if...

you are a Salesforce ISV looking to accelerate your value pipeline
you are an enterprise company using Salesforce, seeking to deliver more user enhancements
you have a growing in house Salesforce team managing orgs and need to transform your DevOps practices.

What is DevOps for Salesforce?

DevOps is a combination of philosophies, practices and tools that helps automate development and operations in order to deliver more value to users while ensuring continuity of service and exceptional support. VRP Consulting provides DevOps services to address the specific challenges of DevOps for Salesforce users while leveraging the infrastructure, tools and automations that the Salesforce platform offers. With the right DevOps implementation for Salesforce, you can accelerate change in your product and across your company.

The DevOps Process

DevOps is a practice that helps to automate your Release Management Landscape by leveraging a common set of tools, processes and philosophies in order to deliver more value to users (e.g. faster time-to-market) without compromising on quality.

1 Plan

Value starts with planning. Development teams, Operations teams, and other third parties oftentimes have competing priorities. Start by assessing and documenting what each team needs. Map out your ideal target-state development, support & associated release processes. Agree on a branching strategy such as 'Feature-branching' or 'Gitflow' that works for everyone before building any pipelines. Agree on a common toolset that considers budget, skill and situation.

2 Build automation

Start building! If you are using an 'all-in-one' toolset like Copado and are migrating from Change Sets, then follow the best-practice setup guidelines provided by the vendor. If you are using a combination of tools like SFDX, Git and Jenkins, start by implementing your SVCS branches, then build your pipelines, and finally configure your pull request rules and deployment automation scripts.

3 Test automation

If you have a suite of automated functional regression scripts and/or unit tests, this is the time to script their execution that is aligned to your plan. As a best-practice example, ensure that unit tests are run whenever a Pull Request (PR) is initiated to a git branch aligned to a QA/SIT Salesforce Org, and automatically reject the PR if tests fail. For your UAT and Production orgs, have your regression tests execute daily or even hourly!

4 Release automation

Continuous Integration or Continuous Deployment? In most cases, automating deployments to a UAT server is sufficient, however if Production deployment automation is needed, make sure you have the right governance procedures in place first (e.g. strict branch merge rules and user permission management in your deployment orchestration software).

5 Monitor

Ensure the whole DevOps team has real-time visible status of all deployment pipelines and notifications sent to their devices that can prompt swift action when needed (e.g. if a build fails). Safeguard against unintended consequences following server updates, by having a continuous suite of regression and unit tests running against your sensitive Salesforce Orgs like UAT and Production.

Benefits of DevOps

Our DevOps services help your business adapt and scale faster without compromising on quality, thereby improving your organizations agility.

Reduce overheads

Automate your Release Management pipeline to cut ongoing development and operational cost leading to a better ROI on your Salesforce investment.

Reduce lead time

Increase productivity with clear development assignments and production-like environments for development and testing.

Increase deployment frequency

Use clear pipelines and automation to accelerate deployment cadence so value gets into the hands of users faster.

Reduce change failure rate

Proper testing for quality of code and requirements ensures deployments leave users complimenting not complaining.

Faster time to restore

When failure does strike, you can restore single features to a prior state in seconds avoiding pulling multiple enhancements.

Who needs DevOps

DevOps for Salesforce ISVs

Delivering a constant stream of value for users at a higher cadence than your traditional approach. Deliver your product roadmap faster while ensuring any user requests are addressed and incorporating the latest advances in the Salesforce platform.

DevOps for Enterprise Clients

Maximise the return on your Salesforce investment by enhancing and automating your Release Management practices. By streamlining your DevOps you can leverage the full capabilities of your Salesforce platform and deliver end-user enhancements faster ensuring continued transformation.

Your Release Management Journey

Level 1: Change set deployments

A suitable approach for small and nimble businesses involving no-code, pushing meta data between sandboxes. Perfect for limited Salesforce implementations.

Level 2: Source based development

Overcome the problems with multiple entities all trying to commit overlapping changes by managing change through source-control and a well-defined branching strategy.

DevOps starts here

Level 3: Migration tools

Medium size businesses can facilitate multiple workstreams via source control and automation tools, mitigating against dependencies and maintaining agility.

Level 4: Continuous integration

Managing ambitious medium and large scale projects with multiple parallel feature development requires strict build controls and automation to ensure quality and speed.

Level 1: Change set deployments

A suitable approach for small and nimble businesses involving no-code, pushing meta data between sandboxes. Perfect for limited Salesforce implementations.

Level 2: Source based development

Overcome the problems with multiple entities all trying to commit overlapping changes by managing change through source-control and a well-defined branching strategy.

DevOps starts here

Level 3: Migration tools

Medium size businesses can facilitate multiple workstreams via source control and automation tools, mitigating against dependencies and maintaining agility.

Level 4: Continuous integration

Managing ambitious medium and large scale projects with multiple parallel feature development requires strict build controls and automation to ensure quality and speed.

DevOps tools and integrations

We configure and integrate the complete DevOps toolset to enable continuous integration and deployment. Utilizing automated deployment tools like Copado, Flosum or AutoRabit we craft CI/CD pipelines, as well as developer and tester tools & services. Your setup will streamline collaboration between development, testing and operations so your team can focus on doing their jobs not managing the process.

IDE

Inbuilt CI/DI pipelines

Jira, Velocity and TFS integration

Inbuilt org comparison tools

Data migration tools

Application Lifecycle Management

Deployment task scripting

Static code analysis tools

Automated deployment tools

We work with your preferred toolset or can advise on the optimal solution, matching your needs, budget and situation. Here are examples of candidate solutions to help with your DevOps process.

Raise the quality and speed of development with the No.1 Salesforce Value Stream Management Platform. As Copado partners, we are experienced with enabling our clients to extract the full value of their Copado and Salesforce investments.
Flosum is a native Salesforce release management tool offering native version control for Salesforce deployments or using other git providers. The clean graphical interface aids adoption.
AutoRabit is a CI/CD release platform available both in the cloud or on premises. It integrates with version control tools such as GitHub, Bitbucket, Gitlab and Azure while providing powerful rollback capabilities.

DevOps consulting and implementation services

Whether you are looking to enhance a single step in your Salesforce DevOps process or rearchitect the entire pipeline for continuous integration or continuous delivery, we can help with strategy, design and implementation of an intelligent DevOps approach to ensure you can deliver more value, faster, and with higher user acceptance.

Review

We analyze your DevOps practice, diagnose bottlenecks, causes of errors and security risks.

Current state assessment of deployment practices and tools
Review of development & operations team structures

Design

Based on your needs and goals, we plan a path forward and lay out your future state.

Complete pipeline architecture
Tool selection
Integration plan
DevOps advisory services for your whole team

Implement

Our Salesforce DevOps engineers redesign your infrastructure with specific enhancements for your new practice.

Creating test environments and infrastructure
Collaboration tools and team integration
Continuous testing and QA

Environment Management

You can rest easy knowing your Salesforce orgs are always up to date. We provide Salesforce release engineers to keep your deployments on track and provide ongoing performance optimizations.

Enablement

DevOps is more than just the tools you use, we provide enablement sessions to ensure your practice is perfectly matched to your approach.

Client voices

VRP Consulting is a team of highly experienced and certified experts. Our focus is to provide you with the highest level of DevOps expertise and support.

How we work

1. Contact Us

All it takes to get started is to complete our short contact form. Once you do, a sales representative will personally contact you to establish your exact requirements.

2. Discover

We conduct thorough discovery processes to identify bottlenecks and dependencies in your current DevOps practice as well as growth areas.

3. Design

With a clear picture of your current approach and your goals we will craft a technical roadmap to enhance your DevOps practice matching your needs, scale and budget.

4. Build

You'll receive regular updates as we configure your new Salesforce DevOps setup via show and tell workshops. Any new requirements can be quickly incorporated and implemented.

5. Implement & Enable

Once fully configured and approved, we deploy your new setup, and test it to ensure everything works. We provide end-user documentation and training to ensure complete adoption of your new DevOps approach and system.

6. Managed Services

To ensure your technical stack is running at full capability as well as adding ongoing enhancements to your DevOps practices, you can access our managed services team.

Find the right solution for your business

Kickstart your next Salesforce project with an award-winning Salesforce partner. Complete the form and one of our consultants will get back to you. No matter your size, industry or requirements, we have the expertise and experience to help you achieve your goals.