AppOps: NextGen DevOps Built for Admins

Last Updated on June 6, 2022 by Rakesh Gupta

DevOps has been a growing topic in the community, especially since Salesforce announced they were working on the DevOps Center last year, but there’s already a new kid on the block—AppOps. In this post I’ll attempt to explain what each is, the key differences between them, and how you can use AppOps to your advantage to transform the way you manage change.

What’s the Difference between AppOps and DevOps

At the core, AppOps and DevOps are about fostering greater collaboration amongst teams by creating a shared framework for change management so teams can deliver higher quality changes faster. Let’s start with some basic definitions.

DevOps is the practice of software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops) teams participating together throughout the entire software development process to ultimately ship software faster. Before DevOps, these teams tended to be pretty siloed and dysfunctional because they had different objectives. Operations wanted to ensure they were only releasing quality software that had been thoroughly tested to customers, but development was rewarded for how fast they could develop new functionality.

AppOps (short for application operations) acknowledges the fact that low-code platforms have completely changed the idea of software development. By enabling anyone to build software apps through point-and-click interfaces, low-code applications have shifted the day-to-day responsibility of managing changes from developers to less technical users.

AppOps’ focus is to take the collaboration and teamwork to a whole new level by engaging admins and business users in the change management process.

The Salesforce DevOps Conundrum

As a low-code platform, Salesforce has become a critical part of business infrastructure powering “clicks-not-code” solutions for the enterprise. After all, anyone can make a change with a couple clicks without having a deep technical understanding of back end coding. Salesforce has made configuring key sales, service, and marketing processes accessible to your entire team.

By lowering the technical skill set required to maintain applications, businesses are able to be more agile. However, more people making changes to the same app means the need for change management and governance is greater than ever.

Traditional DevOps tools are designed for use by an experienced developer who can handle complex back end coding. Concepts like version control, separation of duties and CI/CD are essential for governance and compliance, but admins and business users shouldn’t be expected to learn command-line interfaces (CLI) or how to do “pull requests” in order to participate in the change process.

While DevOps tools allow users to better manage changes to Salesforce, they introduce a new system that still requires the highly technical knowledge that Salesforce was designed to eliminate in the first place. What happened to “clicks-not-code”? What use is a declarative platform if the essential tools for managing it have such a high barrier to entry?

Fortunately, there has been an evolution in DevOps that allows the entire team to make these complicated changes with ease.

Introducing Next Gen DevOps: AppOps

AppOps follows the belief that low-code applications deserve low code tools and aims to preserve the business agility benefits of low-code without compromising governance and compliance controls. Unlike scarce and expensive developers, admins and business users are not only less scarce, they are better positioned to manage changes because they are embedded in the very business processes they are tasked with improving. Offloading certain, if not the majority of changes, onto this larger population of users is what enables organizations to unblock IT and increase business agility.

AppOps takes complex DevOps practices and redesigns them into an intuitive interface to help teams with their change management process. AppOps simply removes the complicated barriers that have kept release cycles bottlenecked for years and makes change management accessible to the end users requesting the business changes, all while providing the guardrails IT requires for compliance and governance. In the same way DevOps operationalized software development and broke down silos, AppOps operationalizes application management and expands collaboration.

As AppOps becomes a more prevalent and viable approach to configuring Salesforce and other low-code applications, those relying on complex, programmatic DevOps tools will fall behind, taking more time to get applications installed, configured, and deployed. On top of that, legacy DevOps customers will be wasting time and money on valuable developer hours to perform duties that other resources can easily perform with AppOps.

Next Gen DevOps: Seamless Salesforce Governance

Prodly AppOps is the first low-code change management tool made with the admin in mind. With Prodly AppOps, anyone can securely configure and deploy changes to Salesforce following a governance framework set by IT. No longer are developer ticket lists a bottleneck to maintaining Salesforce. A point-and-click tool for point-and-click applications, Prodly AppOps takes the complexity out of governance and compliance, giving the power to make changes back to admins and business users.

Prodly was founded to address the fundamental hypocrisy of needing developers to configure a low-code application. From the beginning, Prodly set out to eliminate the complexity and coding requirements of DevOps tools and simplify complex change management processes into tool that anyone—admin, business user, and developer—alike, can use.

Relying on developers to manage Salesforce deployments is no longer a practical decision. Neither is allowing users to make changes to critical business systems without guardrails. Enterprises can no longer wait on legacy DevOps tools to make the necessary improvements to become more accessible and admin-friendly. Fortunately, the next generation of DevOps is already here, and it is Prodly AppOps.