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#xpo-copado
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2021-05-18
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Mike McDaid - Copado09:05:52

Hello everyone, Welcome to the Copado channel! πŸ‘ We look forward to getting to know you all better overΒ theΒ next 3 days. We'll be online throughout the day to answer any questions you have about Copado and Salesforce DevOps. Stop by our https://doesvirtual.com/copado to see a quick demo of https://doesvirtual.com/copado!Β  What's on today?Β  🎀 3:20pm - Join the 'DevOps for Salesforce' session in Track 3 breakout room: https://doeseurope2021.sched.com/event/i53r/devops-for-salesforce?iframe=noΒ Β Β  πŸ“– 4pm-5pm - Ask the Author - Andrew Davis, Author of Mastering Salesforce DevOps will be on the Copado channel to answer your questions! Plus swag giveaways throughout the day! 🎁

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Mike McDaid - Copado11:05:55

Any Salesforce Developers or Admins in the house? πŸ‘‹

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Mike McDaid - Copado15:05:23

Welcome to the Ask the Author session with @abd3721 (Author of Mastering Salesforce DevOps) πŸ“–

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Mike McDaid - Copado15:05:51

Have a question? Go ahead and ask below πŸ“£

Mike McDaid - Copado15:05:22

How common is it that Salesforce teams are facing DevOps challenges?

Andrew Davis - AutoRABIT - DevSecOps for Salesforce15:05:22

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

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Julien Laluet15:05:50

Hi, from my sales experience : as long as the complexity is low and the team very small (<4 people), people are facing challenges that are acceptable and manageable

Andrew Davis - AutoRABIT - DevSecOps for Salesforce15:05:40

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.

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Andrew Davis - AutoRABIT - DevSecOps for Salesforce15:05:54

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

Julien Laluet15:05:01

If this seems familiar to you, you're on the right channel :thumbsup:

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Jeremy Lee15:05:38

How much similarity/difference is there between Salesforce and DevOps on other platforms?

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Andrew Davis - AutoRABIT - DevSecOps for Salesforce15:05:56

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

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Andrew Davis - AutoRABIT - DevSecOps for Salesforce15:05:30

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

Andrew Davis - AutoRABIT - DevSecOps for Salesforce15:05:56

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

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Julien Laluet15:05:16

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.

Andrew Davis - AutoRABIT - DevSecOps for Salesforce15:05:58

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

Andrew Davis - AutoRABIT - DevSecOps for Salesforce15:05:27

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

Andrew Davis - AutoRABIT - DevSecOps for Salesforce15:05:07

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

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Julien Laluet15:05:24

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.

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Julia GΓ€tjens15:05:24

Is Copado looking at supporting the dev lifecycle for any other technologies like SAP?

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Andrew Davis - AutoRABIT - DevSecOps for Salesforce15:05:48

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.

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Julien Laluet15:05:48

Hi @dmitry.luchnik ! Which kind of DevOps challenges are you facing on the Data side ?

Dmitry Luchnik /// adidas Data Analytics architect16:05:58

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.

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Andrew Davis - AutoRABIT - DevSecOps for Salesforce17:05:48

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.

Andrew Davis - AutoRABIT - DevSecOps for Salesforce17:05:05

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

Andrew Davis - AutoRABIT - DevSecOps for Salesforce17:05:44

@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.

Dmitry Luchnik /// adidas Data Analytics architect18:05:45

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!

Andrew Davis - AutoRABIT - DevSecOps for Salesforce18:05:27

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

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Dmitry Luchnik /// adidas Data Analytics architect18:05:24

For me this conversation is also help πŸ™‚ So thank you!

Dmitry Luchnik /// adidas Data Analytics architect18:05:29

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

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Andrew Davis - AutoRABIT - DevSecOps for Salesforce18:05:45

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).