DevOps Center

Salesforce has long acknowledged that the platform has outgrown change sets, but SFDX was (and still is) perceived by its customers as a tool solely for developers and those comfortable with the command line, despite the VS Code extensions that made it easier to work with. A considerable ecosystem of third-party providers such as Gearset, Copado, AutoRABIT, and Flosum had sprung up to provide platforms for robust DevOps that better matched the wider IT industry’s best practices. These tools gave Salesforce developers and admins capabilities such as organization-to-organization comparisons, version control capabilities, static code analysis, and deployment pipelines.

Salesforce entered this space with the release of DevOps Center, which became generally available in December 2022. While not as feature-rich as the incumbent solutions from the third-party ecosystem, it represented a change of messaging from Salesforce to all users – a move away from change...