DevOps has been an intrinsic part of implementations and processes ever since they featured any kind of regulation, and for good reason. Although Salesforce, as both a software and a community, took a little longer to catch on, it is now a prominent and well-adopted set of methodologies.
A DevOps practice allows teams to build, test, and deliver high-quality software to users quickly, but it took a while for it to get to where it is today. So, how did it evolve?
What Is DevOps?
According to GitHub, DevOps is a “software development methodology that supports the efficient, continuous delivery of innovative, high-performing applications and services.” Essentially, it’s the culmination of development (Dev) and IT (Ops) teams and processes so that every step of the development process can be completed more efficiently.
On an even more granular level, DevOps boils down to a set of practices that attempt to balance the speed of software delivery with high reliability.
Within the Salesforce environment, the concept of DevOps remains fundamentally consistent. However, its primary focus is centered on optimizing the software development lifecycle to ensure the most efficient deployment of changes possible, minimizing bugs and disruption for users.
It is also important to mention that in Salesforce, a lot of the traditional tasks handled by Ops teams, including performance tracking, load balancing, memory utilization, and more, are conventionally handled by Salesforce. So the Ops role in Salesforce pertains more to managing Salesforce resources, with more complex requirements in more complex orgs.
In terms of benefits, DevOps has a fair few. If you integrate DevOps tools into your pipeline, you can benefit from faster, more reliable deployments, increased release cadence from automations, better security thanks to monitoring and backup, and more.
How Has DevOps Evolved?
Recognizing a Problem
According to software company Atlassian, DevOps is estimated to have emerged sometime between 2007 and 2008, when there were mounting reports of dysfunction within the IT services and software communities, and professionals were beginning to understand how agile accelerated software delivery.
Back then, developers and Ops professionals had different objectives and responsibilities, meaning that they worked fairly separately, leading to frequent siloes. This was quickly becoming a problem, so technology leaders in this space at the time, including Patrick Debois, Gene Kim, and John Willis, began working to establish a solution.
That’s the whole reason DevOps took off as an idea; development and ops teams used to be at loggerheads, where devs were measured on speed of change and ops were measured on reliability.
The Birth of DevOps
In 2008, Debois, who is considered by some to be the “founding father of DevOps,” met with software developer Andrew Shafer, which led to the creation of the Agile Systems Administration Group.
The focus on agile was key here. Peter Chittum, the Technical Director at Salesforce Ben, said that in a lot of ways, DevOps was “almost a natural consequence” of the rising adoption of agile.
“Agile dealt solely with a set of practices to make software delivery better and faster, and empower developers, but it didn’t include the ‘minders’ of that software in the equation,” he said. “Developers kind of ran headfirst into the folks tasked with keeping the lights on. DevOps built a framework that could take the positives of agile but include the ops teams too.”
Shortly after, Debois launched his own event known as DevOps Days, with the first taking place in Belgium, and quickly gained traction within the community. It was through bringing like-minded professionals together that the benefits of DevOps fully began to be recognized, and this went on to lead to actionable change. These benefits included making software development and related operations more reliable, reducing the time needed to bring software products to market, and more.
What Does DevOps Look Like Today?
Today, DevOps has moved past its days of just sitting within agile software development. It has helped teams who have the coding and the methodologies down get their processes and workflows moving quickly, transforming the development and operational lifecycles.
DevOps touches every aspect of these lifecycles, relying on automation to speed up and stabilize how software is delivered. Continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) replaces slow, manual code merging and scheduled deployments with automated testing and shipping, allowing high-performing teams to deploy many times per day instead of every few months.
Git underpins this workflow by providing fast, distributed version control with branching and merging, enabling teams to collaborate efficiently and automate major parts of the development pipeline.
Beyond development, DevOps extends into IT operations. IT service management (ITSM) treats technology as an end-to-end service, covering everything from devices to mission-critical applications. Incident management also plays a key role, meaning that teams monitor and rapidly resolve outages or failures. In modern “you build it, you run it” approaches, developers and operations work together to prevent incidents and minimize recovery time when issues arise.
How Does DevOps Work in Salesforce?
DevOps within Salesforce works in a specific way, bringing structure, automation, and version control to a platform that historically relied on manual, click-based changes.
Traditional Salesforce development tools included change sets, manual deployments, and ad-hoc sandbox work, meaning that deployments were slow, tedious to execute, and extremely error-prone. Not only that, but this method of working offered little to no visibility or rollback ability – two vital aspects of a successful, ongoing development process.
In 2017, Salesforce launched Salesforce Developer Experience (DX), a set of tools designed to improve the traditional developer’s experience of building on the platform, including the Salesforce CLI, a new IDE, scratch orgs, second-generation packaging (2GP), a new metadata format, and the dependency API.
It was built to support source-driven development, and, as my colleague Lucy Mazalon put it, it didn’t take long for Salesforce’s partners to build DX functionality into their DevOps solutions, making DX workflows accessible to no-code developers and admins.
In 2022, Salesforce launched the Salesforce DevOps Center, marking the next step into DevOps for the CRM giant. By this point, change sets had become outdated, and developers needed to get more from their processes, making DevOps Center the perfect tool.
New DevOps tools are being developed and released all the time, and it is now an integral part of the work many professionals do in Salesforce. In fact, according to Gearset’s 2025 State of Salesforce DevOps report, there are now very few teams (13%) with no ambition to begin their DevOps journey.
However, there is still likely some work to be done. According to our latest Salesforce Developer survey, 20% of developers still use change sets; they may still be useful for some, but how do we encourage a full shift to DevOps?
Who Does Salesforce DevOps Impact?
As DevOps has grown as an operation within Salesforce, more professionals and teams have begun to play key roles within it.
According to DevOps Advocate Jack McCurdy, professionals now need to really understand how DevOps touches everyone involved in software delivery.
“The DevOps equation is ultimately the whole software delivery lifecycle, right down to your backup strategy, recovery strategies, and the monitoring strategies for your org,” he told Salesforce Ben. “It’s important to understand that everybody has a part to play in the smoothness and efficiency of the entire DevOps efficiency loop.”
“I’m not saying a business analyst needs to go out and learn how to script a CI/CD pipeline or be responsible for the backup solution, but they do need to understand that the more efficient they can be in their section of that life cycle, the better.”
Salesforce DevOps and AI
Like with most tools and processes in Salesforce now, DevOps has both a new opportunity area and hurdle: artificial intelligence.
Stronger and more valuable use cases for AI within DevOps are becoming more common, and DevOps will likely play a vital role in ensuring AI development processes are delivered efficiently going forward.
“With growing Agentforce adoption on the horizon and recent security breaches top of mind, many teams are rethinking how they manage org complexity and delivery risk,” Kevin Boyle, the Co-Founder and CEO of Gearset, told Salesforce Ben. “Used wisely, AI will bring faster, safer, and more efficient delivery. Used poorly, it risks amplifying bad practices and creating even more complexity.”
“Already, we’re seeing agents act as expert architects within organisations that are surfacing risks, guiding teams, and enabling better decisions at speed. [However], AI is an optional accelerator and is there to help teams’ decision-making, not replace it.”
That particular sentiment will be crucial for DevOps to keep in mind; AI should not replace traditional, human decision-making, no matter how widespread a view it has over a pipeline. The whole reason DevOps was founded was to connect teams – stepping away from that now has the potential to rewrite years of progress.
Final Thoughts
Salesforce DevOps is one of the most important methodologies in Salesforce and wider tech development, connecting IT and development teams and helping them achieve faster, safer, and more effective deployments.
Now, DevOps faces the next phase of its journey: AI. How businesses marry up the two will likely influence how their current and future AI strategies perform, but if they continuously keep the human in the loop, DevOps could transform them entirely.
