Speaker 1: Here we go another episode of Adventures in DevOps. Jillian,
thank you for joining me as co host today. Hello,
Warren is off on vacation getting some much needed rest
and relaxation and also joining us today, Vernon Keenan from
Salesforce DevOps.
Speaker 2: Welcome, Vernon, Thank you, thank you.
Speaker 3: It's great being here. I hope, like, I'm sure some insights.
Speaker 2: Dude, I'm pretty sure you can.
Speaker 1: Because I'm particularly excited about this because it's not very
often that I get to hang out and talk with
people who have been doing this longer than I have.
Speaker 2: So I'm not trying to like throw out your age
or anything, but I feel like.
Speaker 1: You know, yeah, I take it as a badge of
honor that I've been doing it this long, and so
when i meet someone who's been doing it similarly, I'm excited.
Speaker 3: Well, thank you, yah. I've been doing it for forty
five years now, that's a while. Started my career at
the Northwestern University working in the medical school, and then
had a great chance to work at Genentech in the early.
Speaker 4: Days, and that was what were we doing there.
Speaker 3: I was doing clinical research, so I was actually one
of the first people to see the results of the
clinical trials because I was doing data analysis and we
used a product called SASS, and of course, because we
were genetic and we thought we could do anything, we
decided to write our own clinical research product. How hard. Yeah,
that was. That was a lesson in humility, right because
because we we we learned that Oracle did a much
much better job at that particular product.
Speaker 4: Than we ever cracked down some hubrist So I'm sure
it was all fine.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I mean it still happens all the time,
you know. I talk to enterprises all the time, and
people still waste their time doing custom projects they could
buy out there.
Speaker 1: I think it's one of those It's one of those
lessons that you can't teach anyone.
Speaker 2: They just have to learn it themselves.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, because you're so conceived, you know,
you know that you think your requirements are so unique,
You think your requirements are special, You think that your
talents and your abilities are special. Well, it turns out
they're not, generally, because usually what happens is a software
company is going to find somebody who is much better
at those qualities than you are, because they're going to
produce it for ten times as many people and they're
going to make ten times as much profit, so they
have as much, you know, ten times as much motivation
to find to find the right people. So but that's yeah,
I got started there, and then I had a fascinating
early career. I was that I was at Oracle and
actually Mark Benioff himself hired me there and I was
working for him, and I had the unique experience of
going into the corporate visits center all the time and
I was basically just lying my butt off all the time,
drawing boxes on the board, putting putting arrows, talking to
the CEO of various global companies, saying, yeah, we can
do this, we can do that. We look at this
application server. It puts everything together, and it was all
It wasn't true. It wasn't true. That's that's what I
call the first act of enterprise software. We basically said
everything was gonna it was going to work. And then
and then it didn't.
Speaker 1: Like first act like a Shakespearean tragedy where you know
what acts too, and there you're going to be like.
Speaker 3: Well, yeah, I mean act too. I think was the
data Lake data warehouse era. We tried to put everything
into like a secondary storage area, and we still didn't
get transformation and we still didn't get you know, new
capabilities out of that. And hopefully we're in the third
act now where maybe things will come.
Speaker 4: It is just going to do it for us, That's
what I think. Well, my data anymore? Who who needs
even Mango dB when I've got AI.
Speaker 3: We could delve into that a little later, I guess,
but but yes, So my friendship with Mark Benioff is
kind of interesting because I recently renewed it. It was
fascinating because I wrote a blog post that got his
attention that said why Salesforce trailblazers don't care about AI?
And my phone started blowing up and I and I
was have renewed my friendship with Mark. So so that
is that that's interesting as well.
Speaker 2: So what's your take on that? Why don't they care?
Speaker 3: Well, the reason was because they didn't actually put it,
make it available in the product. So the thing about
Salesforce that I liked as a you know, like I
got my first Salesforce account actually way back in nineteen
ninety nine, and I've been using it, you know, on
and off, and I actually built my own business on
it about starting in twenty twelve created a whole enterprise
product for telecom that I used in my business. And
the reason why I thought that the Trailblazer community was
so active and so forthcoming with chips and tricks and
like techniques and sharing and things like that was because
the SaaS pricing model basically gave you all you could
eat for a fixed price. So any Trailblazer would be
able to like go to the set up menu and
search for a new feature, for example, and then they
could just like start trying it out. So those capabilities
were always in there. But because AI seems to be different,
mainly in terms of the cost that the companies have
to burden to provide it, they didn't do that. They
made you order a product. So while they were all
carping and you know, saying AI this and AI that,
like ninety five percent of the Trailblazers out there couldn't
get access to it. So that that was my point.
And the thing that was a fascinating story actually is
that what happened was Mark read that they sent me
the keynote and I actually was able to like edit
the keynote and tell them what they should fix. Oh wow,
And this is like three days before Dreamforce, and and
they I sent it back to them. They put all
the changes in, They changed product timelines, accelerated timelines, and
just you know, made a bunch of people, you know,
you know what happens with the CEO says do things
to a bunch of people they weren't expecting to do
things like over the weekend and.
Speaker 4: Weekend that at all.
Speaker 3: That's right, it's gone. You know. It's like plus, you
got all the stress of you know, Dreamforce coming up,
all the prep and now they got to change all
the products. So they changed it. They actually included a
free version of their new Agent Force thing in a
new go to market version of their product they call Foundations,
which is kind of like you can just buy it
with a credit card as opposed to dealing with one
of their account executives. They so they actually changed the product.
Not sure how effective that was, but kind of just
like in any situation, when it did, it just peeled
the onion a little bit and revealed another problem underneath,
which is how are they going to charge for it?
So they haven't really figured it out yet is the answer.
So there's a lot of confusion out there. In the
Salesforce world as to how they're gonna pay for it.
The all this magical AI stuff. Sure it keeps talking
about for sure, But so get back to the saastevops thing.
I just tell my story a little bit more so,
Like I said, I was in Telecom, I had this.
I had built an actual tax engine on the Salesforce
platform for Telecom, which is you can imagine, it's pretty complex.
And I had an opportunity to kind of like leverage
that tax engine outside of Telecom. And so I realized
that Salesforce was kind of a bad platform for that
because of its performance characteristics. You know, like if you're
gonna have an API service, you don't want to rent
it off as salesforceas it was just too much overhead,
too many constraints. So I personally got into more of
I think your world of DevOps kind of like the
go Kubernetes world, and I implemented all of my stuff,
you know, my new API, my new database everything with
Go Kubernetes. It was beautiful scalables, you like, one hundred
times faster than Salesforce. And so I had that, but
you know, business wise, that project didn't go anywhere so
I had all this wonderful new DevOps knowledge plus being
the Salesforce expert, so I turned my attention back to Salesforce,
and then I realized that they were in deep, deep,
deep trouble when it came to release management. Basically what
happened was Salesforce had an initiative in the late twenty
tens was called the sfd initiatives where they essentially created
a command line interface to their metadata API, and this
enabled developers to pull configurations out of a Salesforce org
and put them into a get repository. So now this
is starting to sound a little bit more like a
regular DevOps workflow, right where you have repository, you have
a somewhat kind of a source of truth, and then
you're able to deploy it again in some fashion, maybe
to another org, or you're changing the deployment and you're
redeploying it to add a capability, fix an error or
something like that. So it turns out that the SFDX
effort was noble and was good and actually was kind
of sufficient to begin the DevOps movement within Salesforce. And
so what happened was all these end users basically started
to try to figure out how to use this SFDX
tool to manipulate Salesforce. And then at the same time,
a group of companies I'll name a few of them.
The leaders are Capato and back then Flowsome, and another
one that's come out is gear Set and all of
these companies. What they did is they kind of operationalized
that API or that CLI interface the Salesforce that provided
end users and put a low code CLICKI interface on
top of that capability, so that Salesforce admins and other
folks who were accustomed to a low code interface could
start to do release management in a more rigorous way
using tools like get or vs code or things like
that to you know, have a more kind of rigorous
development effort. But at the same time, it was still
constrained a lot by the way that Salesforce works. So like,
here's here's a crazy thing. I mentioned this metadata API, right,
and you think that this metadata API would love let
you to actually pull all the information out of a
Salesforce org so that you could reproduce it, like maybe
copy it to another org or something like that. Turns
out that there is neglect within Salesforce the company to
implementing the metadata API, so they have they have definitely
a priority to get the low code interfaces out there first,
so they actually recognize that they've gone to the point
now where it's a real problem. And some of these
DevOps companies. Another one I'll mention is Elements Cloud, and
they're interesting because they have all kinds of proprietary ways
to go into the Salesforce Org and get out that
metadata that's not available through the API. So this kind
of gets into a central theme that I have all
the time when I'm talking about SaaS stevops and Salesforce DevOps,
which is that the way these things work is that
you kind of have to treat the subject's system, you know,
like the Salesforce Org that you're updating or the org
that you're reading or copying. You have to kind of
treat that thing like a living system where there's there's
no source of truth really other than the state of
the thing that it's running in now. And that's really
quite problematic because you have to, like in order to
understand if you can produce a deployment that's going to work,
you know it's not it's going to go through and
not have any errors. Essentially have to like the only
way to do that is the is to submitted to
the org and see if any errors come out. So
you can imagine how slow that would be on an
iterative basis and how frustrating. And this actually gets back
to a complaint that Salesforce developers in the community have
about working with Salesforce, which is that it's very slow.
It can and like as somebody who went from goot
Go to apex, you know, Apex is the is the
development language, this jab alike language they have for Salesforce.
So like with Go, I could just you known't compile things,
you know, hit you know, recompile or whatever, go and
I'd have like ten seconds between a coding change and
being able to see if it worked. With Salesforce, that
can go out to maybe two or three minutes sometimes, right,
So when you submit a package to either your Scratch
org or even you know, a Sandbox org for testing,
it's still going to take you know, like ninety seconds
two minutes that for that submission to go in. So
I think Salesforce developers are always complaining about this this
flow of work thing, and the way that you can
fix that as a vendor is to do kind of
what Elements is doing, which is to create what I
call a very complete digital twin of your subjects SaaS
system within the DevOps product that you're working with. So
Elements has a separate like AWS thing running where they
essentially ingest all of the metadata from an org and
convert it into like a graph database or some other
kind of representation that they can then manipulate. And then
they can use that to do something which is very
essential in Salesforce, which is called impact analysis. So like
if the boss says, oh, we got to have another
you know, shipping type in the shipping module or whatever,
then that thing needs to be defined in what they
call a picklist in Salesforce. And when you change the
picklist though, you could actually impact a whole bunch of
different things, you know, different screens all over the place,
apex code, user interface mechanisms, and other things like that.
So by having a digital twin, you're able to easily
pick do what I call impact analysis or change intelligence
is another word they use for that. My favorite term
is blast radius for sure. You know, like like when
you when you make a change, what's the blast radius
potential of that particular change? And so that's a that's
a critical and that's just one thing, one example that
you can't get out of salesforce and that you do.
You need a DevOps service provider to help you delve
into that and to help you organize that stuff.
Speaker 1: So let me pause you real quick right there and
like reach out the problem here for our listeners. So
with these large enterprise style SASS, I think you're describing
two problems here. One is you never know what the
true state is. So someone with the appropriate permissions could
go in make a change to the environment and you
don't have any way of tracking that change to see
what was actually impacted, aside from asking that person, hey,
would you do and getting their typical response nothing.
Speaker 3: And then the.
Speaker 1: Other one, the other aspect of this is if you
want to introduce new features or capabilities to your system,
you don't have any way to create like a staging
area and test your changes before you apply to production.
Speaker 3: Correct. Correct. So those are those are both capabilities that
DevOps products, salesforce and SaaS stevops products that you do.
And the most popular salesforce s deevops product is from
a company called gear Set. They're in England and the
simulated deployment is the most popular feature of that product.
So that's and it's also affordable, so like for two
hundred and fifty bucks a year or whatever to get
a seat for that thing. Yes, yeah, it's pretty cheap,
and it'll save you a ton of time. Basically, it's
that iteration.
Speaker 1: Yeah, at that price, it doesn't even need to save
you more than a few minutes per year.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah. No. And and gear sets easy to buy too.
That's another reason why they're popular. They kind of have
a you know, a PLG product led growth concept where
they just try to make it easy to use, easy
to buy, you don't have to talk to a sales rep,
where with most of the other products, is more like
an enterprise sales Yeah, sales loop where you got to
kind of delve into dealing with somebody and then coming
up with a license agreement.
Speaker 2: Jillian, you were about to say something, Yeah, I.
Speaker 4: Was just wondering who is kind of the target audience
for this, because on the one hand, we have salesforce,
which is you know, like a sales tool, right, and
then on the other hand, we're talking about DevOps and
from the you know places that I've been at the
sales and marketing team is not necessarily going to know
where I want to have anything to do with any
type of DevOps project. Right if they could be running
things off of their laptop and accel or whatever, they
probably would and would have nothing to do with somebody
like me. So I'm just wondering, what are kind of
the target audiences of these different tools.
Speaker 3: Well, that's changed over the years, so I think that's
important to realize. So the Salesforce has evolved over the
last let's say eight or nine years into an enterprise platform,
so it's more like an application delivery platform than a
pure CRM than it was in the past. And also,
if there are several customers out there, salesforce customers out
there who are spending in excess of one hundred million
dollars a year on Salesforce and kind of the minimum
for a fortune five hundred type company, the minimum expenditure
is in the tens of millions. So because of that,
a lot of the responsibility for maintaining Salesforce has moved
off of the departments and into the office of the CIA.
So I think that that's part of the explanation for
why people care about DevOps is in Salesforce now, and
it's been it may have been taken out of the
hands of some of the departmental because that they want
to increase efficiency. But I think, Jillian, you're right that everybody,
you know, there are lots of people out there who
could care less about DevOps and really want to use
Salesforce kind of like what they've been telling you. How
they've been telling you.
Speaker 4: For marketing tool, I thought it was like a more
robust like HubSpot or something.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's.
Speaker 4: A contractor thing and I have like Harvest and HubSpot
for emails. I thought that it was a fancier version
of that. And now I'm finding out that I was
so wrong.
Speaker 3: Is well, you're not, of course, are not wrong, but
I mean, there's just the they it's more like they
want it to be bigger. And the other thing to
appreciate about salesforces is that when they're in a big
company selling, their number one goal is to have multiple clouds,
as they call it. So they have their sales cloud,
their marketing cloud out, their commerce cloud. Now, they have
data cloud, now, they have you know, all these other
things that are kind of all designed to work well.
Actually they're not well designed to work together, dirty little
secret out there, but and they're trying to make them
all work together. They're actually rewriting.
Speaker 4: Somebody doing their best.
Speaker 3: They are, you know, I'm a critic of them, and
I always like to, you know, have a little empathy
in my criticism. But they're, yeah, they're they're trying. They're
trying to do that. But I think they definitely want
the attention on their product to be at the CIO level.
And a lot of vendors now are in the salesforce
ecosystem are kind of like turning their sales pitches in
that direction. Where before the sales pitches need to be
used to be more in a land and expand kind
of philosophy, so that they would be pitching to the trailblazers,
would be pitching to the sales managers, would be pitching to,
you know, the people who are actually using these products more.
But the pitch has definitely turned more to the CEO
CIO level pitch and like. And also let's look for
a minute at where DevOps is most prominent in salesforce,
and it's it's almost always in a critical application. So
there's a salesforce partner out there called Encino and Capital
ci n O and they are a multi billion dollar
valuation public company that that runs on top of Salesforce
and what they do is banking, so there will do
financial transactions and banking service. So you can imagine that
the people who are running and Sino installations definitely want
DevOps right because they they definitely want to be able
to have a record of all the changes they made
to their system. They have validation protocols, they have q
A protocols and they and they have to sustain them.
And there's actually a DevOps company that's pretty much devoted
to that one sector and it's called auto Rabbit. It's
a cute name, huh yeah. The their annual conference is
called dev hops.
Speaker 2: Yeah, good job.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I like auto Rabbit. They have some Greek people
there and and they they're very rigorous in terms of
the security aspects. It often gets folded into salesforce DevOps too,
like static security analysis and and other things like that.
So yeah, I think the reason why there's been a
transition from Salesforce being kind of this this SaaS platform
that you just use to being something that has to
have like a change management process associated with it is
mainly the introduction of critical applications into it. There was
another product used to be on Salesforce called Viva. Made
a heard of them. They're a big, another giant software
company who services pharmaceutical industry. So you know, like I
used to work at Genetic, and it totally reminds me
of what we're doing. Is kind of like the software
QA and validation that we had to do for the FDA,
you know, like a Genetic we had to like have
a protocol for for how we like did all the
rat lab way, you know, so that we could produce
that protocol to the FDA and say this is how
we weight all the rats, and and the similar thing
happens with software too, right, So they that that's where
this kind of culture came from, I think, and it's
it's now been extended more into Salesforce.
Speaker 2: So what are the.
Speaker 1: Like In my experience, very few people who really need DevOps.
Speaker 2: Know that DevOps is the thing they need.
Speaker 1: So what does a conversation look like for you when
you're talking to people that clues you in to say, oh,
here's what you're missing, here's here's what this problem is
describing to me.
Speaker 3: I think it's release management problems. That's that's the other
essentially equivalent description for what the field is in Salesforce
because like I mentioned before, the there is so many
speed bumps and roadblocks to developers to to get the
is going. So if you're what a lot of these
products do is they offer you cic D pipeline automation
as well, so they kind of give you a clicking
interface to let you do pipelines. And again it's it's
more compatible with the Salesforce trailblazer kind of profile to
have that. So I think it's it's a common pain
point in almost every Salesforce shop that does customization is
is this. And they also know that the vendor ecosystem
is out there to service them because if you're part
of the whole Salesforce, you know Dreamforce World Tour thing,
you know all all of their outbound communication and their
partnership programs and everything. There are companies like Capato and
gear Set and flows some and all these companies are upfront,
you know in terms of their partnership, and Salesforce actually
has investment relationships with some of these like Capato, and
they does the Sales Force frequently recommends them to solve
problems for big people. So I think people realize that
the release management in Salesforce is still broken, still a
lot of problems with it, and you probably need some
vendor help to help you get through it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm sure.
Speaker 1: Just thinking about it from a Salesforce perspective, you know
how they started and where they got to. Now you're
dealing with thirty years of legacy code and now you're like, oh, hey,
let's do this new thing. I would imagine that that's
not an easy implementation.
Speaker 3: No, it's not. It's uh. I think you get a
lot of some of these tools are bought and not used. Yeah. Uh,
that shelfware is a big problem in Salesforce ecosystem. The
I think they people are are always looking for solutions
to this kind of thing. And especially if you have
that external pressure of like uh, you know, a QA
officer or somebody like that in your organization, who's going
to you know, be looking down your shoulder, or if
you have external regulatory concerns or things like that. I
think that that really is the dividing line. I think
I think of all these companies, like I would say,
there's about it's something like about a billion dollar market
I think for all the software and services for stev ops,
So that might be a little bigger than the people
have thought. I think about a quarter of that is
software and about three quarters of that would be services
from people like you know Accenture or whoever. You know
global system integrators who are consultant houses that frequently come
in and and and do this kind of thing. So
I think the other thing that I think we want
to talk about today, and we can kind of switch
subjects a little bit here is is like three years
ago I wrote this blog post where I said predicted
that SaaS deevops was going to be a thing. And
I recently was talking to one of my old customers,
Op Sarah, and and they have they're out there really
trying to make this saastevops thing work. And here's the
thing that they've noticed talking to customers now, is that
at the CIO level, or maybe at the Center of
excellence level, you do have a lot of people now
thinking about how to manage every business platform in their company.
So you have what is I've heard some crazy numbers
like if you're a fortune five hundred, you have maybe
up to one thousand different applications running in your organization,
and maybe if you're a department, you might have fifty
different online apps or SaaS apps that you could be
using for this kind of thing. So I think the
same kind of momentum that we saw in Salesforce, where
they become it becomes more critical, it becomes more widespread,
it becomes harder to manage, so that it kind of
rolls up to the CIO level for concern. This is
happening with other products as well. Obvious ones like s
A P four Hanna or or you know, like oracle
ERP or something like that is one of them, but
even things like Jira or things like HubSpot or things
like Zendesk is a big one. So people, there's an
expression there's a thing out there now that I think
kind of goes hand in hand with the platform engineering
movement actually that CIOs want some sort of universal business
platform system that they can use to do that. And
I've seen various salesforce DevOps companies, just a handful of
them have been successful. Two of them I want to salto.
Another one is up Sarah to kind of do this,
to have like a code user interface to do SaaS
DevOps on different application products, But I kind of have
a feeling that it managers are looking for the solution
right now that they want to have a universal application
to be a digital twin manager for all of their
different SaaS products.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: For sure, there's a big risk factor there as well,
because we pretty rapidly ran to the SaaS world and
now in hindsight, you can look back and say, oh, wait,
all of our business critical data is not ours. It's
sitting in a SaaS somewhere, and so how do number one,
how do I manage the control and permissions in that?
And also what's the blast radius when that SaaS provider
gets hacked?
Speaker 3: Oh right, Yeah, I mean it's all as of security
and safety considerations and data governance and and retention problems there.
I think I think the a lot of people are
kind of over the idea of the SaaS data being
stored in somebody else's computer being not your data, you know.
I think that most people have an export capability, and
I think that the success as SaaS is kind of
like an indicator that people are are are getting over that.
But I think the they definitely want to have some
way to consolidate DevOps sprawl in their organizations, because this
is I think something you're seeing that goes along with
these separate business systems. So if you're going to have
a salesforce DevOps team, you're going to have an SAP
DevOps team, You're going to have maybe a Jura DevOps team.
So I think that if you're a CIO and you're
trying to consolidate tool usage and trying to get people
to work together better, I think that the looking at
how you now have release management processes and critical infrastructure
processes associated with these SaaS products, that that there's a
SAS DevOps discipline that could be developed around this that
that would consolidate and systematize your ability to manage all
these things.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it almost strikes me as very similar to back
in the nineties when you were doing desktop configuring, Like
when you were building, like if you had a salesforce
of two hundred people, you know, you only made it
through the first two or three computers before you were
looking for some way to automate it, and then that
took you into the world of like modifying the Windows
registry and and all of that kind of stuff.
Speaker 2: It feels very similar to that.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, like in other words, taking a bunch of
crazy configurations to trying to manage them under one roof Yeah. Yeah, yeah, that's.
Speaker 4: Were there biolinics.
Speaker 1: Well, I think that's where we all ended up. But
now here we are facing the same problem again.
Speaker 4: No, I just I just remember, like you know, a
certain team trying so hard to get all the bioformatics
applications bundled with one distro of Linux, and I don't
know they really tried. Okay, you guys they tried was
Biolinus and that was that was my job to manage
that for like a.
Speaker 3: Year, BioLinux.
Speaker 4: BioLinux. Yeah, it was. It was like a I think
a distribution of Hubantu that just had a lot of
bioformatic software pre installed. So it had like R and
Blast and all like the mixed off all the top
general mix software at the.
Speaker 3: Time you could, I don't know, sounds like a project.
Speaker 4: Very small gene. Oh my gosh, I don't.
Speaker 3: Know that that was. That was a while ago.
Speaker 4: I think that was that was a while ago.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 4: You're talking about desktop management. That was my job for
a little bit was to install BioLinux on all the
new Scientist computers.
Speaker 1: So do you think companies like Salesforce have a roadmap
of taking this problem in house and bundling it as
part of Salesforce or you think they're going to rely
on the external vendors and support them and solving it.
Speaker 3: I think the solid answer is the external vendors are
the ones to to to rely on. I think because
of generative AI. I think that there will be disruption
though in DevOps right now. And I think maybe a
year ago there was a rumor going around or it
might have been just a hope from the Copato people
that Salesforce might buy Capato, and after they bought own
back up recently that for over a billion dollars that
so that possibility came up again. But if I was
you know, look, if I was an advisor for Salesforce
on this, I would say maybe try to hold off
on that because the uh just dovops is going to
be highly disrupted by AI. I think, like like like,
For example, I was telling you the story about the
digital twin for example, So that's so if what that
required to create was to ingest all of the metadata
from a salesforce Org and then create a structure around
it so that you could then use it traverse it
in some way like a graph database for example. And
you can actually achieve that same functionality now by simply
ingesting all of the XML metadata and just putting it
in a giant blob or rag or into an organized
semantic database is the better way to do it. And
then you can use an LLM to get the same results.
So you can use an LLM to find a blast
radius for a chain proposed change without creating a graph database.
So that means a new entrant in Salesforce DevOps can
possibly have the same kind of capability that that you know,
elements Cloud and Penia and few of these others have
to find the blast radius with almost.
Speaker 2: No coding all right on.
Speaker 3: Okay, So so this is just one example of the
revolutionary capabilities of of a I when it when it
comes to two DevOps. So I have a like there
was a company in y combinators current batch called s
r dot a I. There's an intriguing r L and
they're doing Salesforce DevOps with the natural language. So you
would be able to uh give it a command like
take uh a deployment from sandbox A and deploy it
to user testing sandbox B just with a command like that,
just with natural language. And I think that this crowd
is the listeners here kind of understand how potent that
would be because that that that would invoke a whole
pipe line process. And also what this company claims they
can do is do repair errors that occur in the pipeline,
so you know, self healing kind of capabilities with that,
which is the thing that AI seems to be really
great at in terms of root cause analysis for errors.
So I think to answer your question, I think that
they may have been thinking about acquiring Capato or one
of the other ones maybe a year ago, because it
is an obvious thing and they're kind of moving out
of this no acquisitions phase that they were in. But
I think right now the field is up for grabs.
Speaker 2: Yeah, for sure, now I see that because.
Speaker 1: In the model you just described, like the the capabilities
of using an LLLM to do that would just dwarf
the capabilities of any team trying to do it by
forcing people to follow procedures and policies.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, And I think also it's just the code
generation aspect of of AI as well that I think
that's considered to be part of Salesforce DevOps. Now, Salesforce
has an agent let's or I should call it a
copilot works kind of like it a co pilot. Even
though market's copilots, they still got some they uh yeah,
they still have the capability to generate code and and
that kind of thing. But and that's part of DevOps.
But I don't think that that they're going to be
supporting it very much, honestly. And I try to get
into that because like this the publisher of Salesforce DevOps
dot net, it's kind of like my job to figure
out for the community, you know, where the solutions are
going to come from. And you know, like they have
a product called Salesforce DevOps Center, and it's kind of terrible.
It just it hasn't been updated. There's the they have
a very sluggish pipeline of features that they're that they're
putting in. If you're aware of how Salesforce operates internally politically,
you kind of realize that this is a kind of
like a group that's that's sitting in a non revenue
position within Salesforce, so that they have no product that
you could put a revenue number on. So if you
don't have that in Salesforce, you're at a disadvantage.
Speaker 2: To making money.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, And I think that this like one thing
I like to compare Salesforce and Microsoft in the in
this respect. I think Microsoft for me as a developer,
as as somebody who uses tools and was looking for
things to put together all the time, Microsoft does it right,
you know what They basically they're going to create an API,
create an interface, and they're going to service the developers first.
They're going to make sure that developers have all the
tools in order to create these applications, and Salesforce does
it kind of backwards. They're going to make sure that
the trailblazers have all the tools to do the CLICKI
thing first, but then then the the DevOps capabilities or
the apex coders or even a flow coder capability is
added later. You know, they got to get this functionality
out the door that people can buy. And it's it's
that mentality that you know, it's just kind of like
a gigantic difference in the founders between Bill Gates and
Mark Benioff. You know that you have, you know somebody
who wants to create a tools that developers can use,
and that's not the mentality at Salesforce. So the DevOps
industry is basically compensating for that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, for sure. And that's been the.
Speaker 1: Pattern I've seen a lot in my career in startups.
You you know, you have two types of startups from
that perspective. You have the ones who are just like
ship it, or the ones who think about the long term,
you know, how do we support this, how do we
configure out, how do we maintain it? And are they're
a little more deliberate in there the delivery. But I
tend to lean towards the former with just ship it,
because odds are from a startup perspective, odds are your
product's going to fail, So you want to fail as
quickly as possible. And in the off chance that it
doesn't fail, well, now you've got money, and with money
you can pretty much solve all the bad decisions you
made early on.
Speaker 3: Well, yeah, that's I tend to agree. I mean, I
think my inclination as a developer is to kind of
go down the wrong road here, which is to make it,
make it perfect. Yeah, you know, I think I kind
of have that O C D A D d uh
uh thing that a lot of developers have, which is,
you know, oh but if I just do that, get
this one thing, get the speed going, you know, cut
out this one thing, it'll it'll be perfect and everybody
will buy it. And then the problem is you always
find some other thing to fix, for sure. Yeah, after
that you get into an now, yeah, always new problems.
And I think you're right. Is you got to ship
the thing. You got to You gotta get customers, You
got to have your m VP out there. You gotta uh,
you know, talk to people. And yeah, you can fix
bad design design decisions.
Speaker 2: Later, for sure. So what is the what is the
this changing landscape look for you? Where if we use the.
Speaker 1: Wayne Gretzky analogy of go, where the puck's gonna be?
Where are you lining up for this?
Speaker 3: Oh well, I'm uh, I'm interested in cognitive DevOps. Now
that's kind of the thing.
Speaker 2: I hadn't heard that term before that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's my term, cognitive DevOps.
Speaker 2: I like it.
Speaker 3: Uh, I like to I call it. That's what sr
e dot Ai is doing, is cognitive DevOps. I think
that we're gonna the other thing that's happening for sure,
and I talked to all these companies. I talked to
Salesforce is this agent concept is. I think it's a
little more real than any other part of the generative
AI revolution that we're now in the third year of.
I guess the reason why is because there's some serious
programming and development behind these things. It's not just the lllms.
It's you've got multi stage lms. You've got a you know,
an LM that does the planning, then you've got other
lms that do the actions for example, and then you've
got other ways to kind of conceive of this. And
I think the most interesting way to conceive of this
is what I call the virtual employee paradigm, and that
I think that this is where it's going to go.
I think that you're going to have the agents and
this is going to happen in DevOps too, so so
you're going to have be able to hire a virtual
employee that functions like your Salesforce ADMIN. That you're going
to be able to communicate with the VE like a
business person, you know, like you are able to express
your business needs to this your Salesforce admin VE. And
then that Salesforce admin ve will actually use RPA or
whatever it needs to do to actually operate the software
to implement those changes and to manage manage it for you.
So I believe that most of the DevOps companies have
a project working on this right now.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I can see that being very realistic because when you
think about the common hands on tasks that happen in develops,
it's you know, create a Kubernetes pod with these images
and configure a database and add that database connection stream
to this parameter, which are all things that are very
much within the capabilities of an agent like that, right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's it's exactly, it's essentially. I think the the
way these ves are going to go is they're going
to replace entry level employees first. So that's just the
kind of thing you would give to your DevOps trainee,
right right, and that uh so, so they're going to
be a joy and a boon to senior people like us,
you know that to know how to use all these
know what needs to be done, and can just give
out the instructions like you're like you're talking to a
junior person on your team. And that, by the way,
gets into the public policy aspect of of this AI businesses,
you know, what's going to happen to all the entry
level chops for sure, what's gonna happen to all all
that kind of stuff. So, you know, I don't want
to be just blight lead talking about virtual employees without
mentioning that you know, there's obviously a public policy and
human impact to this, and I think it's if you're
a young DevOps person right now, it's you know, I
have no other have nothing to say other than I'm
kind of worried about that because I think that you
look at this ve thing and something that you can
associate with that is what I call VEE economics. And essentially,
if you can hire let's say you needed twenty of
these DevOps junior people in your giant company, well you're
going to start experiencing some economies of scale that you
won't experience with people. Right So on the twentieth one
of this, you're going to get a big discount from
whatever service provider that you're getting this from. So there's
kind of like new economic laws that are that are
that are happening here, and one of them is you
know the law of infinite scale. The basically, you know
you take away the profit margin, and you know, you
get a service provider like Salesforce and they'll be happy
to provide you all of these agents or virtual employees
at a at a discount. So now you've got the
prospect of being able to grow your head count without
a linear increase in expenses. So this basic property of
vee economics, I think is what's going to drive uh
this forward, is that this is something that CEOs get
immediately right and that you like, they're there. What is
what does the CEO do? They manage their workforces, they
manage resources, they they they take inputs and outputs, They
think in terms of profit and laws. The they are
extremely interested in this. Like I've talked to the Agent
Force rollout from Salesforce in September was definitely changed the
landscape in terms of their sales. Right now that I've
been talking to system integrators and consultants and they're getting
calls from their CIOs basically because their CEOs are saying, hey,
you know, I saw what Mark's talking about. I get
this ve economics thing. Get me some of these virtual
employees as quick as possible. And so it's we're seeing
a different shape of demand right now, And I was
talking to another one of these cognitive DevOps companies and
they're actually going in there making the sale based on
what their customer is paying a salesforce admin. So this
to me is kind of revolutionary because it implements what
people are calling the service as a software model. And
what that means for the software industry is that not
only are you able to, let's say, get budget out
of an existing IT budget, but now you're able to
get budget out of an existing human resources budget.
Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure, that's crazy, and that just yeah, that
gives you you know, you refer to it and sales
a lot it. You know, it gives you stickiness because
now you can bring multiple decision makers in and create
compelling arguments for each of those.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, it's it is wild, I think. So, you know,
where am I looking for things to go? I think
I'm sticking with the DevOps thing. The cognitive DevOps, I
think is going to be a huge disruptor. I think
that they're going to slowly get into this area, and
I think that we're going to have pretty soon you're
going to have virtual employees. Let's say within two years.
I'd say, who would be able to manage or release
management process all completely on their own, so that that
would be tremendous in terms of automation and time savings
for the salesforce admins that are left to do that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that is crazy disruptive when you think about kind
of all the industries that could be applied for, Like
it wasn't too long ago that we had you know,
secon ferries and things to help with scheduling, and now
we have virtual calendars that can do all that. And
I think AI is on just a completely different scale
than even these kind of revolutionary technologies that we've already seen,
like virtual calendars and a word processor, you know, like
being a word processor used to be people's jobs as well.
For sure, I don't know, it's got to be scared
to be a young person in like who's coming into
the industry now or you know, or thinking about coming in.
Sure it's scary for everybody else too, but I would
be especially scared as the young people because of what
you said about the entry level jobs like just being
obliterated by AI.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm really concerned about that. You know, as a
policy prognosticator, I definitely see a problem there. I also like,
I see this ve economics is like a giant sucking sound,
you know out there that CEOs are locked in. I
think it only took him a few months to get
locked in on this, on this thing. And like here
in Silicon Valley, I couldn't think of a single young
entrepreneur who isn't thinking about dream who was in dreaming
about building their company this way as well. So and
I think that they're getting tremendous encouragement from the venture capitalists. Also,
this vee economics story, if you bring it to the table,
if as a startup entrepreneur and you're and you are
able to latch onto that, I think that that is
a story that just instantly sells with investors as well.
So I think we're about basically. Another thing I like
to say is we have not reached the peak of
expectations of generative AI. You know, there was a talk
that maybe we had hit that trough of disillusionment for
some referring to the Gartner HiPE cycle graph here and
the people thought we'd hit the trophic disillusionment with the
enterprise AI this past summer. And would I never felt
that way because of the conviction that I have on
the subject, which like, here's a simple reason why I
have conviction. And I'm sure you've heard this example before.
But let's say you've got a pile of ten legal
briefs and you need a lawyer to kind of examine
those in the context of a case you're working on.
That would have taken you know, the cheapest lawyer you
could have hired and the Philippines or whatever for like,
you know, seventy five bucks an hour to do something
like that. That would have cost you, you know, three
or four hundred dollars, And now that costs you three
or four cents to do the same thing. And that's
actually a reliable application that I'm referring to here, and
where the hallucinations are not that much of a problem
and you can do things to manage it. So when
you've got anything, it's like a three or for order
of magnitude change in economics. To me, that's like an
inevitable force. It's similar to like the distribution of paper catalogs.
What happened to that in the nineties because it was
literally a thousand times cheaper to send that stuff around
the world as a PDF. Then you know, over the internet,
then you actually print and distribute it. So I think
this is why I have conviction on AI is that
kind of basic cognitive change. And that's actually one of
the second economic laws I've kind of been working on,
which is, you know, this the ability to have cognitive
scale that you can do things with AI that was
previously not possible or was so expensive you couldn't do
it all the time, that you can now do it
with AI. So that's those that's where I think it's going,
and it's I think it's it's generally good because I mean,
like the abundance side of this equation of this of
this idea is that if we make it easier to
make to build software, more software will get built. Right two.
So that's another thing. I mean, there's there's the market
Andresen quote where he says software will eat the world. Well,
according to Gartner, they're only about thirty or forty percent
done really, so like if you look at the cloud migration,
the we've still got more than half of corporate data
is still on prem So I think it's you know,
there's a long way to go with the stuff. And
I'm pretty sure that cognitive DevOps is probably going to
be one of those things that kind of like seeps
into the background and we take for granted three or
four years from there for sure.
Speaker 1: And I do want to, like, for all the young
listeners listening to the show who are still early in
their career, I want to give them some hope and
not send them away from the episode going, well.
Speaker 2: Dan, that was a buzzkill.
Speaker 1: So, you know, we've seen this in the past, not
exactly like this, but we have seen you know, like
Jillian was mentioned, there used to be a career called
word process or like you were mentioning Vernon, you know,
you used to have people who ran the printing presses
for printing paper catalogs.
Speaker 2: And we saw the outsourcing movements.
Speaker 1: I was a kid, yeah, and we had the outsourcing
movement of the nineties and early two thousands of outsourcing
the tech jobs in the US to other countries. So
there's there's patterns. There's historical patterns you can look at
if you're still early in your career and see what happened.
Speaker 2: Where did those.
Speaker 1: People who were displaced, where did they go? And then
see if there's some parallels here in this type of movement.
And you know, back to the Wayne Gretzky quote, start
steering your career in that direction.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think you got to look at the you
got to move up the application stack. Essentially, you have to.
I think the thing that folks like us are gifted
at is to be able to understand capabilities and marry
them to problems. Right, So you need to be I
think we're going to have fewer people in it is
definitely a thing, but I think that we're going to
be doing more good work, and we're going to be
doing more work that's actually tied to whatever the enterprise
that you're working for does, because it's a I mean,
we're all familiar with the Phoenix project, right. It's amazing
how many dysfunctional IT organizations there are out there. You know,
we have people who have no idea why they're doing something.
You know, they have no idea that you know, like
working on this weird salesforce problem is somehow going to
help the company like they can't translate that into that.
And I think what's got to happen in our profession
is we have to become more aligned with business. For sure,
it was and so I think that if we're able
to use tools like AI and cognitive DevOps to remove
us from some of the daily grind of this and
some of the drudgery that goes along with it. Then
I think we're making progress and we have the ability
to expand out talent so that talent, young talent can
can use their imagination and there are new ways of
thinking and other gifts of youth to you know, participate
in the economy more in terms of constructing solutions and
working more where the rubber meets the road in a
particular organization. I think we're just like, you know, don't
have elevator operators, don't have buggy whip makers. You know,
we might not have more DevOps engineers in the future.
We might have few of those because of automation. But
I think the people if you're looking to marry your
love of technology, your ability to see solutions, your imagination
to pull things together, I think that there's a lot
of business people who would love to hear from you.
Speaker 1: For sure, there's always going to be problems that don't
have solutions, and one way to look at this is
you can shift your daily grind from solving the problem
of why doesn't this doc or container build to a
higher level problem of something that the customers of the
company you're working for are going to value.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I always try to give that advice to, you know,
whenever I'm working with students, are talking to young people,
the very wary of putting yourself in a position where
you don't know why you're doing what you're doing. Always
try to, you know, kind of move up the ladder
to the decision makers, talk to the people who are
actually using the product you're creating, if that's what you're doing,
or that kind of you know, the equivalent and sort
of whatever job it is, do you have because if
you can, if you can keep identifying problems, you can
keep having a job. For the most part, is at
least what I've found. And obviously you know that's not
always a perfect strategy, but I think it's much better
than kind of sitting in your corner and saying I'm
going to be the best Python or Go developer of
all time, right, Like that's that's maybe not the best goal.
It should be instead, want to solve this problem, and
then there are always new problems, you guys. Always they
never end, like they just they never they never stop.
So no uplifting advice. There's always new problems, always, right.
Speaker 3: And I think also it took a lot of resources
and a lot of capabilities to solve some of these
problems with it in the in the past, and now
you could do it with less. So I agree. I
think that there are more problems to be solved always,
and I think that we're going to have a different
kind of flatter world when it comes to doing this.
I think there's going to be suer middle managers, fewer
people trying to function as gatekeepers because we're going to have,
you know, assistance to help us with some of the stuff,
for sure. So that's where I think it's going. If
you want to aim your puck in the right direction,
I think it's it's for that.
Speaker 2: Awesome What do you think should we move on to picks.
Speaker 3: Us?
Speaker 4: So I'm going to go with the shameless self promotion
this week. I am opening up I don't know, maybe
five to ten spots for and actually an AI product
that I have now that we've you know, had this
nice end of the show on how AI is going
to take all the jobs and things. Let me take
some jobs away from your company. No, I'm just kidding.
It's cool. Stuff to empower your scientists to do different tasks.
The most frequent, one frequent one that I see is
to be able to do literature text mining and throw
you know, thousands of papers at it and then to
be able to get some type of information. I work
in drug discovery, so it's it's mainly drug discovery. I
do have an article on that. It's called using LLMS
to query PubMed knowledge bases for Biomedical research and kind
of like what it says, you can query a PubMed
you can throw all of your papers at THEAI, and
then you can tell the AI you don't please summarize
this for me. So it's a product that I have
that gives you a chat GPT like interface that your
scientists can use. But it's all self hosted on AWS,
so none of your data gets out if you have
proprietary data, if you have you know, pre clinical data,
all that kind of stuff, or other data science companies
that I don't know what you all are doing, but
it might be useful for you too, I don't know.
So anyways, it's got the chat GPT like interface, and
then it's also got a programmatic interface that you can
use wherever you have a terminal stage maker HPC wherever
all the things are. That'll be on my website dabblodepops
dot com, slash ai if anybody is interested in that
and would.
Speaker 2: Like to try it out right on awesome vernon. What'd
you bring for a pick?
Speaker 3: Well, I got my website so dot net and invite
everybody to come by there. Like I said, I'm I'm
also on LinkedIn vernon keenan all together is my is
my thing on LinkedIn, and I would just my pick
is I want people who are complaining about Salesforce ops
or have complaining about the pricing models and things like
that to contact me because I'm trying to gather.
Speaker 2: Input right on.
Speaker 4: It's not like a support group that could be, that
could be.
Speaker 3: It is it is, you.
Speaker 4: Know, It's just we're gonna get all these people and
we're all going to have like snacks and fuzzy blankeys and.
Speaker 3: Just it is. That's what I'm trying to create, is
just a comfort group where we can all complain and
and give each other let us know that Salesforce is
not paying attention to us and this thing. So here's
but it'll start out with a fine counseling session with
me to get all your complaints. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes,
So trying to you know, be the trailblazer whisperer here.
So the more trailblazers who contact me to tell me
about their problems with data cloud and agent Force, the better.
Right on?
Speaker 2: Awesome?
Speaker 1: All right, my pick this might be one of the
wildest things I've ever picked. But with the holiday season
coming up, if you're looking for a gift for someone.
Speaker 2: And they are a male, I'm going to suggest Shine
sty underwear, which.
Speaker 1: All right, it's hard to get excited about underwear, and
I was pretty skeptical at first, but I used these.
I ended up with some and used them extensively a
year or so ago when I was training to run
a one hundred k Ultra marathon.
Speaker 2: So the ones I had, I was to say, that
is crazy.
Speaker 4: Okay, anyways, carry on, carry on.
Speaker 1: So I'm just gonna say my shine Steeds are battle
tested and they have performed well. So yeah, that's my pick,
and that's probably the one that's gonna get me kicked
off of this podcast. But you'll have a pair of
Shinty to take it.
Speaker 3: Shinesty's uh boxers or briefs.
Speaker 1: I like the I like the long leg briefs.
Speaker 2: Just the the support factor. Mm hmm.
Speaker 3: Okay, we're going into the chafing aspect of Yeah, of
the podcast. Absolutely, he will and Jillian, this is fantastic.
Speaker 2: I really appreciate have you on the show. This was great.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much for for joining us. And uh,
feel free to to come back and chat with us
again at any time.
Speaker 3: We can.
Speaker 2: We can do this later and see how our predictions went.
Speaker 3: Yes, yes, yes, we'll see how my little mission to
h fixed agent force pricing goes.
Speaker 2: Right on.
Speaker 3: That's my current missioncause nobody knows how much.
Speaker 1: It costs right on, looking forward to good that's a
big problem.
Speaker 2: Okay, great yep. To the listeners, thank you guys all
for listening.
Speaker 1: Appreciate having you support the show, and we'll see you
all next week.