Circle Internet Services Inc., a DevOps platform provider for continuous integration and delivery, today announced new and updated Salesforce.com Inc. integrations that will make it much easier for DevOps teams to build and support Salesforce apps.

The two newly announced updates include a new version of CircleCI’s Salesforce Apex orb, that will allow Apex developers to fully use CI/CD practices within their deployment strategy, and an updated Salesforce CLI orb that fully encapsulates a command-line interface for easy access to common commands.

Recent reports released by CircleCI have shown that by adopting DevOps practices through the company’s software, teams can achieve in minutes what would normally take hours.

Using CircleCI’s orbs, DevOps teams have seen workflows finish in 80% of the time compared to traditional methods – and most finish in less than 10 minutes.

“The Salesforce Platform empowers developers to innovate fast, scale with confidence, and empower everyone at their organizations,” said Wade Wegner, senior vice president of product management at Salesforce. “The latest integrations with CircleCI will further provide our developer community with CI/CD tools to establish and automate their development processes.”

Salesforce Apex is an object-oriented programming language that allows developers to execute transactions and control statements on Salesforce’s integrated customer relationship management platform. The new CircleCI Apex integration orb, which is the name for CircleCI’s encapsulated features, includes an updated variety of automation to make DevOps practices and CI/CD easier.

“We’re seeing more developer work being done within highly tailored and specific environments like Salesforce. Our newest Salesforce Apex orb allows Apex developers to build, test, and deploy their applications with world-class CI/CD practices,” said Jim Rose, chief executive at CircleCI. “Before, developers would spend hours learning the required commands and syntax to configure, build, and deploy correctly. The CircleCI Salesforce Apex orb allows them to achieve the same functionality much more efficiently.”

Updates include the automatic deployment of changes to production, unit testing and results display in the Salesforce Platform user interface, and the ability to build and deploy high-scalability server applications and deploy them to pre-configured orbs.

The second announcement is updates to the Salesforce CLI orb, which debuted from CircleCI last December. The command-line interface integration has been updated with even more commands that allow developers to create an automated development pipeline that can load and trigger command line arguments within the Salesforce platform.

“Using these orbs, developers can continue to build on the Salesforce platform directly, with the ability to run and test their pipelines in CircleCI,” said Rose. “The ability to enable best-of-breed CI/CD best practices in just a few clicks will make it even easier for developers to build and integrate with Salesforce.”

With CircleCI orbs, developers and DevOps teams gain access to numerous pre-configured modules that provide access to thousands of out-of-the-box use cases without the need for complex configuration.

Since launch, orbs have been widely adopted by CircleCI users and now 22,000 organizations can integrate from a selection of more than 1,600 CircleCI orbs.

Image: CircleCI