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DevOps and Salesforce

This page defines the two terms at the center of this course and explains why, when they meet, they don't behave the way you'd expect.

DevOps in plain English​

"DevOps" is one of those words that means different things depending on who's in the room. Here's the version that matters for this course:

DevOps is a set of practices for getting software from development to production as reliably and quickly as possible. At its core, it answers a straightforward question: how does a change made by a developer become something a user can actually use?

The practices that answer that question are version control, automated testing, staged deployments, rollback procedures, and audit trails. They were invented for teams building traditional software: web applications, mobile apps, and backend systems. The tools they use were built for that world.

Salesforce is not that world.

Why Salesforce DevOps is different​

Salesforce isn't software you write and deploy to a server. It's a platform you configure and extend, partly by writing code, but mostly by clicking, dragging, and declaring: creating fields, building flows, setting up permission sets, designing page layouts.

The changes your team makes don't live in text files on someone's laptop. They live in the org itself: a shared, cloud-based environment that is always on, always changing, and interconnected in ways that aren't obvious until something breaks.

This creates a specific problem: when you try to apply standard DevOps tools to Salesforce, you're taking software designed for one kind of system and forcing it onto a categorically different one. The result isn't just friction. It's a predictable set of failure modes that show up the same way, on almost every Salesforce team, everywhere.

That's what this course is about: naming those failure modes, explaining why they happen, and understanding what it takes to actually solve them.

You don't need to know what Git or CI/CD pipelines are to follow this course. Those terms will come up, but everything will be explained from scratch when it does.