Five or six years ago, it was pretty rare to find Salesforce teams using version control or trying to automate their dev lifecycle. But talks on the topic began getting more prevalent at Dreamforce over the last few years. And it's hit a fever pitch with more and more people looking for such a solution

Yeah, Salesforce makes it really easy to get started and make sense of changes as long as the complexity doesn't get too high. But there's some point at which there's so much activity, and so many actors that things stop being nearly so clear.

So teams lose a lot of time trying to make sense of things

The fundamental concepts are the same between Salesforce and other SaaS and non-SaaS platforms. People need dev, test, and prod environments. People make changes that need to be merged, tested, and deployed. And the more collaborators you get, the more complex everything becomes

But you have critical differences between SaaS and non-SaaS: the involvement of non-coders in the dev process, new ways of tracking changes (XML, etc), unusual challenges with testing (since Salesforce manages the UI), etc

So a big need for a specialized solution to tackle Salesforce issues

SaaS and configurable platforms were pretty easy to modify, and simple at the beginning. No versioning or specific DevOps tool was required at that time.

Yup. Same with code-based systems back in the 1980s. Who needs version control? 🙂 What makes the difference is the amount of changes and innovation being made on those platforms

As the amount of changes increases, there's no alternative other than to find a way to track history

Like for an organism ... memory is an evolutionary investment, that only makes sense when you reach a certain level of complexity

The level of sophistication of custom dev' solution (Java dev, .Net dev) has been creating a need for such kind of versioning solutions, build/compiling engines, deployment solutions, code checks and also testing. 10 years back some of these solutions became more mature in the custom dev ecosystem, but still nothing was existing in the "platform ecosystem". But the Digital transformation initiatives become always more complex, always bigger, always with more changes to incorporate on a last minute basis.

More and more companies are putting more and more of their innovation into SaaS platforms. All of those SaaS platforms function similarly in that there's a lot that's managed by the SaaS provider. That's different from what you'd find in a pure custom code solution. So, yes, Copado is actively working on the dev lifecycle for SAP and other clouds.

cc @dmitry.luchnik

Basically the question is - how new data management tools from SAP like BW/4HANA on prem / SAP DWH Cloud / SAC can be covered by CICD cycles? We managed to run a full CICD DWH, but it's based on native SQL (still some challenges btw, host a talk tomorrow on this). But SAP we left out of scope because of the way how SAP defines the object. E.g. meaningful diff is not existing for a HANA view. What I/m looking into - are there working solutions e.g. how handle e2e bw/4hana data pipeline - extraction-psa-adso in case of a source system created a new column.

Hi @dmitry.luchnik I'm checking with one of our SAP specialists to get you a more thorough answer. Basically with SaaS platforms you're always at the mercy of what info they do/don't expose. But often the info they expose is potentially useful if there is an easier way to work with it. That's the case for Salesforce - it just requires some code to parse and manage all the XML - and Copado is working on solutions for SAP that will allow us to handle some of that complexity centrally.

I'll respond more if I get more info specifically on SAP

@dmitry.luchnik our contact responded that she wasn't an SAP backend expert, so she wasn't able to contribute any specific info about DWH or BW. Again, Copado will be working on some SAP-specific tools, although we may start with S4 for example.

Thank you @abd3721 for the info. SAP offers something for S4 (at least I can google a webinar from them on the topic - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjOWukUMUx4), but I do not see similar content for BW or data integration solutions. Anyways, thank you for checking!

BTW, this is another one for DI: https://blogs.sap.com/2020/06/11/sap-data-intelligence-git-workflow-and-ci-cd-process/

Nice, thanks so much @dmitry.luchnik! We wanted to help you, but you're helping us 😉

For me this conversation is also help 🙂 So thank you!

And sorry for the off-topic. Just saw a lot of commonalities with your Salesforce topic

Agreed. There are commonalities. The main similarity is that even solving this SAP problem one-time for one project is a major undertaking. And thus is a place where a product company can help (centralized solution).