DevOps Pipeline: What It Is & How to Build One

A well-built DevOps pipeline automates the software development and delivery process, making sure code changes are tested, integrated, and deployed efficiently. This reduces errors, enhances team collaboration, and speeds up the release of high-quality software, allowing you to quickly deliver value to customers.

A DevOps pipeline is a set of automated processes that simplifies the developing process through the development, testing, and deployment phases of software. It also integrates workflows between development and IT operations teams.

The primary purpose of a DevOps pipeline is to create a rapid, reliable software delivery. By automating repetitive tasks, you reduce the time and effort needed to release software and updates.

This speeds up the entire development cycle, improves collaboration, and enhances software quality. Your team’s software can always be ready for deployment and be adapted when necessary.

While the traditional phases of DevOps focus on streamlining the development process, the DevOps pipeline takes it a step further by implementing learnings across all projects and organizational practices.

Building your DevOps pipeline within the Salesforce DevOps Center will include the following important phases of development and production.

The main focus in DevOps is to automate the application development process by following these six continuous phases:

• Plan: Start by defining project requirements and breaking it down into individual tasks. Then with the development team, share detailed design specifications, along with identifying the different development and testing environments.
• Create: Developers write the application code based on the project requirements, and compile the code into executable artifacts. This includes setting up version control systems to manage changes and collaboration among team members. A successful creation phase will often include AI and automation for maximal efficiency.
• Verify: In the verification phase, the compiled code is put through tests to identify any bugs and issues. This helps your team check that the code meets quality standards before it moves to the next phase.
• Deploy: The deployment phase involves moving the software into a production environment. This includes managing the infrastructure, monitoring system performance, and performing routine maintenance tasks. Automation is often employed during this phase to make sure everything is consistent and error-free.
• Release: Next, the software is prepared for deployment. This includes finalizing documentation, setting up release notes, and ensuring all necessary approvals are in place.
• Monitor: The monitoring phase involves continuously tracking the application's performance and user experience. Monitoring tools help identify issues that are happening, allowing for quick responses to any problems that arise.

After development is an integration stage where all changes from the various development environments come together to be tested in an integrated environment.

This stage is where you identify conflicts across teams and processes and resolve them before you move forward.

You will have one or more stages in between “integration” and “staging” where you perform additional testing performed by business stakeholders, often called user acceptance testing (UAT). We indicate this stage as the bundling stage, where you version a group of related changes and move them together through the pipeline.

Performing final validation, or “staging,” before you promote the changes to production is important to identify any last details that need attention.

The final destination for your changes. The environment or “org” for this stage when using the DevOps Center to build your pipeline is your live Salesforce instance.

There is no single way to build a DevOps pipeline; it depends on various factors such as budget, experience, and the chosen technology stack. The use of specific DevOps tools also plays an important role in shaping your pipeline. When you’re building your DevOps pipeline, consider some best practices to help it go smoothly and to help your pipeline meet your company’s needs.

Establish a culture of automation: To improve the efficiency of your DevOps pipeline, create a culture of automation.

• Automate repetitive and manual tasks wherever possible, from code integration and testing to deployment and monitoring. Automation reduces human error, speeds up processes, and keeps work consistent across the development lifecycle. Creating this type of culture helps your team work faster and frees up time and brain space for more creative and strategic work.

Implement version control and continuous integration: Select a continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) tool to automate the integration and delivery processes, which simplifies code changes from development to production.

• Additionally, a version control system will track changes, manage code repositories, and boost collaboration among developers. Continuous integration tools can then automatically build and test your code with every change, catching errors early and helping keep the codebase stable.

Choose a source control management tool: Implement a source control management tool as well. These tools allow multiple developers to work on code simultaneously, manage versioning, and track changes efficiently.

Set up a continuous integration (CI) server: Establish a CI server to automate the integration of code changes. The CI server will continuously build and test your code, ensuring that new changes do not break the existing codebase.

Use automated continuous testing (CT): Make sure that the software is continuously validated against various quality criteria by running automated tests at every stage of development.

• From code integration to pre-production, you can catch and fix issues early. This component enhances the reliability of the software and ensures that only high-quality code moves forward in the pipeline. This includes various types of tests such as unit tests, functional tests, integration tests, and regression tests. Consider automated testing tools to speed up the process even more.

Run unit tests: Test individual components or functions of the code to ensure they work as expected. Try these three tests:

• Functional tests: Validate the software against the functional requirements.
• Integration tests: Ensure different modules or services work together as intended.
• Regression tests: Check that new code changes don’t hurt any existing functions or code.

Ensure security and compliance: Security and compliance should be integrated into every stage of the DevOps pipeline to protect your company and sensitive information.

• Start with techniques like code scanning, vulnerability assessments, and automated security tests, to identify and address potential risks early. Check that your pipeline meets regulatory requirements and industry standards by protecting sensitive data and maintaining compliance. To do this, try having regular security reviews and updates.

Facilitate monitoring and feedback loops: Continuously track system metrics, user behavior, and application performance with real-time feedback.

• This allows for proactive problem detection and resolution. By integrating monitoring and feedback into the DevOps pipeline, you can quickly identify and address any issues.

Implement continuous operations: This is a newer feature that helps make sure systems remain available and functional at all times by focusing on the operation of applications.

• That includes automated updates, scaling, and self-healing capabilities. Continuous operations help support deployment without downtime or degradation in performance.

Outsource: To build a great DevOps pipeline, consider hiring a knowledgeable DevOps engineer who can guide the setup and maintenance of the pipeline.

• In addition, evaluate each step carefully before moving on to the next to make sure everything lines up correctly. This iterative approach helps identify and address potential issues early, leading to a more efficient pipeline.

Automating your DevOps pipeline can help your teams maintain consistency, reduce errors, and accelerate the software delivery process. In fact, automations save desk workers an average of 3.6 hours per week. DevOps automations do so by taking care of repetitive tasks – that frees up time for developers to focus on more strategic activities.

One of the primary benefits of DevOps is improved collaboration and communication between development and operations teams. The pipeline lets them share responsibility and work together to achieve common goals. Instead of separating dev teams and operations teams, they can work together for faster issue resolution.

Another key benefit is the ability to release software faster and more frequently. Automated processes in the DevOps pipeline enhance the deployment cycle, allowing you to push updates and new features to production with greater speed and reliability. This agility lets your organization respond quickly to market changes and user feedback.

Additionally, you get better quality and more reliable software. Continuous integration, automated testing, and monitoring helps make sure code changes are thoroughly validated and issues are detected early. Plus you’ll have faster delivery times.

A DevOps pipeline will help make sure your team’s code is working and create functional applications that can be deployed quickly. Building one does take time, but it’s time and resources well spent. The return on investment can help your development process become much more efficient.

Salesforce DevOps Center is the easiest way to get started with DevOps, integrate essential tools into your pipeline, and optimize your development process for improved compliance, product quality, and faster delivery.

Dive into our comprehensive DevOps guide to kick off your journey and explore customizable process templates you can implement in your pipeline for a smoother experience.