Category: DevOps

DevOps Compliance – Why You Need to Automate (2023)

Security is a crucial component in the development of any great software solution. It’s all about trust. If the customer doesn’t trust that their data is safe, then they won’t use the product. Compliance organizations and standards ensure that developers meet high standards of safety and security, but if any coding errors are missed in the development process then you have to retrace your steps and try to fix the problem. This creates significant delays in the development and release processes. A proper DevOps automation platform erases this slowdown. 

What is Compliance?

ADP defines compliance in business as, “ adherence to all local, state and federal jurisdictions that govern your operations.”

For context, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) are two examples of compliance standards you’ve probably heard of before. 

In software development, compliance is making sure that all code meets the standards set by governing organizations aiming to only allow secure and legal products to be on the market.

The Challenge

Compliance often prolongs release times. 

If the standards aren’t met at every step of the development process, teams will have to go back into their code, diagnose the error, and implement the solution.

This eats up a lot of hours that could instead be used for something like improving the user experience, running marketing campaigns, or hosting demos for potential clients.

How can this be avoided?

The Solution

Lots of teams have tackled this challenge by implementing Compliance Automation.

By automating compliance checks throughout the entire development process, errors are caught earlier. This way, the code can be corrected as it’s written, instead of after its been implemented for weeks or months. 

Simply put, problems are flagged by your automated system, so your team goes in and makes the correction, and the product can hit the shelves earlier because the error was fixed almost immediately. 

How Can DuploCloud Solve This Problem? 

DuploCloud is a “DevOps automation platform that accelerates time-to-market by translating high-level specifications into low-level details for fully managed cloud configurations.”

With out-of-the-box compliance controls for SOC 2, PCI-DSS, HIPAA, HITRUST, NIST, GDPR, and others, you can completely automate your DevOps Compliance processes, saving time and boosting efficiency.

Check out their demo page if you’re interested in learning how their solutions are succeeding in cloud infrastructure automation.

While meeting compliance standards can be a pain-in-the-neck, they do ensure that software is ready to be out in the real world and I definitely don’t see them disappearing anytime soon. So, you should be integrating compliance into your processes early on, so you can boost efficiency and bring your products to market faster.

Version Control for Beginners: The Ultimate Guide (2023)

Imagine this: You’ve spent weeks working on your team’s next salesforce app and one of your colleagues goes into a sandbox org to make some changes, but he didn’t realize that his changes would overwrite the ones you just made. Before you know it, all your changes are erased, and you’ve lost days, maybe weeks of progress. If you had been using a Version Control System (VCS), this disaster could have been easily avoided.

In this blog post, we will discover what version control is, what a VCS is, and how it changes the game for Salesforce DevOps.

What is Version Control?

According to Atlassian, version control is the “practice of tracking and managing changes to software code.”

It’s simple, really – it’s a way for software developers to never lose any state of their code. No one can accidentally delete someone else’s work, no one can permanently overwrite code, and progress is never lost.

What’s a VCS?

The VCS is the system that tells you who made a change and when they did it.

Instead of relying on complicated email threads, handwritten notes, or worse, the changes being stored in one team member’s noggin, a VCS keeps everything clearly organized and backs up all versions of the program, averting the crisis of destroying weeks of progress.

There are loads of different version control systems, but one that’s particularly effective is a git-based system. Git is easily the superior option for version control and I think it’s safe to say that 87.2% of developers would agree.

Version Control and Salesforce DevOps

So – what does this mean for salesforce developers and admins?

Salesforce DevOps teams are ideal candidates for implementing modern version control. Salesforce orgs can get especially complicated, making it all the more important to have a well-organized version control system to track code that teams are working on.

How can Blue Canvas help with Version Control?

Blue Canvas is a git-based tool that handles versioning, backups, and continuous integration for DevOps teams.

Their solution automatically syncs all of your team’s changes to a git repository, keeping track of all your salesforce metadata sandbox updates.

Here’s an example from bluecanvas.io of what pairing salesforce DevOps with a VCS looks like in action.

So, now you know what version control is, how version control systems work, and you learned a bit about how this all impacts salesforce DevOps. On top of that, you even heard a bit about a real-life application in bluecanvas.io. I think it’s safe to say that you’re no longer a newbie!