Salesforce Dreamforce 2023: Lesser-Known Dev Tools Enable Observability

by Charlotte Dunlap, posted in Big Data, Cloud Enable
C. Dunlap Research Director

Summary Bullets:

• Salesforce unveiled a slew of important announcements within the fast-emerging generative AI (GenAI) space.

• For many coders, some significant, lesser-known releases and capabilities emerged that aim to make developers/DevOps’ day-to-day tasks a lot easier.

Those Salesforce Dreamforce attendees who stuck around until the end of the week got to listen to, for many, the most important speech of all – the developer keynote.

Earlier this month at its mega developer and customer conference, Salesforce unveiled a slew of important announcements within the fast-emerging GenAI space, including Einstein 1, Einstein Copilot/Studio, Prompt Builder, and updates to Einstein Trust Layer (for more, please see Generative AI Watch: With Einstein Trust Layer Salesforce Addresses Biggest Hurdles Holding Back Enterprise Adoption, September 21, 2023).

But for many coders looking to dig a little deeper into the weeds, some significant, lesser-known releases and capabilities emerged that aim to make developers’ lives a lot easier.

President and Chief Engineering Officer Srini Tallapragada began the keynote by asking whether the world still needs developers, what with the advent of GenAI. He noted that because of GenAI, low-code to pro-code developers are being supercharged through the extraction of higher-level abstractions in their app modernization tasks. He was indicating that developers remain necessary for their ability to determine how best to leverage GenAI for the most valuable outcomes. As with so many emerging technologies supporting app modernization, operationalizing AI has not been easy, and the industry needs experts to steer enterprises toward best practices.

In fact, Tallapragada noted that the industry will witness entirely new markets for skills to empower GenAI (platform engineering and prompt engineers come to mind). These new markets, shaping the role of DevOps personas will be driven by technologies and concepts like AI, automation, UX, and DX.

Salesforce demonstrated its most prominent achievements in 2023: Data Cloud, Einstein Trust Layer, and Einstein 1. New, less publicized capabilities mentioned during Dreamforce provide smoother access and low-coding capabilities based on those platforms. It was clear Salesforce is beginning to infuse GenAI across its popular platforms including Einstein 1 Copilot Studio, Prompt Builder (including Apex Prompt Builder), and Skills Builder. It also provided a peek into newer capabilities related to monitoring, demonstrating how Salesforce is moving into new market segments such as observability.

Noteworthy announcements aimed at improving developers/DevOps’ day-to-day tasks included:

  • DevOps Center, in 2024, will track changes and fix errors as workflows move through systems. It provides source control via click versus code, allowing more low-coder developers to participate in effectively meeting business goals.
  • Scale Center helps DevOps better understand application performance and event monitoring, with the ability to support deep-dive investigations. This indicates Salesforce’s growing move into observability.
  • New command tools within DevOps Center will help unify the developer experience so the CLI can also be used to integrate with Data Cloud. Actions may be triggered through Data Cloud and MuleSoft.
  • Code Builder, a new web-based integrated development environment (IDE), has the power of Salesforce’s popular Visual Studio Code IDE (namely via AI integration) for faster, more efficient coding. It represents MuleSoft’s progress in helping developers leverage accelerators and connectors to help build APIs.
  • Code Analyzer, the company’s open source (via partnerships with OSS providers) code quality, security, and performance monitoring tool (represents a move toward shift-left and DevSecOps).
  • Einstein for Developers, an AI-powered productivity tool supports natural language designs to generate Apex code.

Salesforce remains highly competitive by integrating GenAI into its platforms, including Flow and Data Cloud, leveraging MuleSoft integration and its low-code strengths.

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