If you’re a Salesforce Admin, you know the struggle. You build an amazing solution in a sandbox, but then comes “Deployment Day.” You’re juggling sticky notes, hunting through spreadsheet logs to remember which fields you modified, and praying you didn’t forget to add a permission to the change set.
You also need to consider your team, to ensure your work is coordinated and that you don’t step on each other’s toes—and that key stakeholders have visibility into what’s happening in the org and across releases.
This is the value of DevOps: bringing sanity, reliability, and visibility into the change and release management process. But practically, what does adopting DevOps Center mean for you today? It means reclaiming your time so you can focus on what really matters—building great apps instead of troubleshooting failed deployments. It means letting the tool do the heavy lifting by tracking your changes, managing dependencies, and visualizing your pipeline so you don’t have to. No more manual spreadsheet tracking. No more deployment night panic. Just a reliable process that gives you your nights and weekends back.
Before we get too far into what’s new with Salesforce DevOps, let’s take a walk down memory lane.
Way back in the “aughts,” we introduced Change Sets as the click-based mechanism to migrate metadata changes between orgs. Change Sets served its purpose for admins but stagnated over the years, lacking usability and modernization improvements.
In 2017 we launched Salesforce DX to bring modern, industry standard development to our pro-code development community. While this was a game-changer for these pro-code devs, it left admins behind because these modern tools were fundamentally incompatible with Change Sets. This created a “collaboration gap” where developers and admins continued to work separately without a good way to sync (or even have visibility into) each others’ work.
In 2021 we launched DevOps Center to bridge that gap. Our goal was simple: to bring those same modern “developer superpowers” to admins, but with a familiar, click-based interface. We aimed to democratize release management, empowering you to collaborate seamlessly with developers without needing to write a single line of code. This ended the era of parallel, disconnected workflows.
But wait, there’s more!
Admins are increasingly expected to manage the entire “lifecycle” of an app, not just its individual components. DevOps Center is your bridge to that future. It helps you adopt modern best practices, like pipelines and versioning, without ever touching a command line. You don’t need to be a coder to use the same powerful tools as developers. This is DevOps for the rest of us.
To support this vision, we’ve continued to evolve from the foundation we built with the original DevOps Center. We not only maintained the key concepts that make release management logical but also responded to your feedback to build a platform that’s faster, simpler, and ready for the future.
We’re proud to announce the beta release of the Next-Generation DevOps Center.
To give you instant access without the headache of maintenance, we’ve moved DevOps Center to a Native Platform Capability versus being delivered as a separate managed package. This means you no longer have to worry about installing or updating managed packages; just toggle it on in Setup to start modernizing your pipeline.
Here’s what you get today.
Once your changes are captured, DevOps Center takes over to make the release process safe and organized.
Stop manually tracking every component you change. We introduced DX Inspector, a new tool living directly inside your sandbox, scratch org, or Developer Edition org, designed to work alongside you.
DX Inspector keeps track of your changes as you make them, helping you manage them effortlessly. It’s flexible, offering functionality both with and without DevOps Center.
As Salesforce environments grow more complex, you now have the opportunity to build and manage the full application lifecycle, not just the apps within it. Historically, this path felt blocked by a steep learning curve involving Git commands and terminal scripts.
DevOps Center removes that barrier. By translating deployment strategies into a native, visual language, these tools help you master critical concepts—such as branching, merging, and pipeline governance—just by using them.
This is your opportunity to expand your impact. You can confidently step into the role of a platform architect, gaining the power to architect how your org changes and scales—all without ever writing a line of code.
Ready to say goodbye to Change Sets? The Next-Generation DevOps Center is available now as an open beta feature. You can enable it directly in your Production org today without any additional signup or waitlist required.
Note: While enabling the tool is easy, moving your team to a new workflow takes a little planning. Review the “Next Generation DevOps Center (Beta)” documentation in the Resources section to help you map out your adoption strategy.
This beta feature is just the beginning. We’re building a future where you don’t just manage deployments, you supervise them. We call this the Agentic Experience: a system where you set the strategy, and AI agents help execute the work.
Here’s what’s coming next.
This is your opportunity to adopt a process that matches the way you already work—click-based, visual, and collaborative. Start by enabling it in production, bring one project through the pipeline, and experience what it feels like to deploy with visibility and control instead of spreadsheets and guesswork. The future of DevOps is native, hybrid, and agentic. Get started with the beta feature today and help us build it.
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