May 7, 2021
1 Click Rollback for Salesforce DevOps

How Flosum’s 1-Click Rollback Makes Salesforce DevOps Amazingly Simple

Have you experienced downtime caused by buggy releases?

Let’s say your app gets through production, maybe your APEX class is working, the tests were all good, QA was phenomenal and it even goes through internal QA testing and finally to production. But just then you receive a call from the client saying that it is not working at all! It is not updating any field and the client can’t use Salesforce. The client wants you to immediately roll back the app to its previous state so they can start using Salesforce again.

If this sounds familiar, you are not alone. Being stuck in a position where a critical component of your application is failing due to an upgrade, the day before, and your clients are furious, can be a nightmare.

Traditionally, rollbacks with most Salesforce release management solutions are not so straightforward. They can be time-consuming and involve a lot of clicks to complete the task. Flosum automates the entire roll-back process extremely well. In this blog, we explore how, unlike the traditional route that most competitors take, Flosum eliminates the need to revert changes in the XML file within the GIT repository. Through automation, Flosum makes it super easy for even Salesforce admins to rollback instantaneously with just one click.

What is a Rollback?

Rollback is a process of undoing changes created by a successful deployment. While this may sound simple when considering one or two components, it can be a nightmare with multiple developers or even a team of developers working in parallel and with multiple deployments. In these cases, how do you manage code overwrites? Or what happens if you accidentally deploy bad code?

Salesforce developers also talk about the difficulty of rollbacks, and the fact that there isn’t a great way of doing instant rollbacks in Salesforce, when in fact, a simple rollback would allow developers to gain confidence and improve the robustness of each deployment.

Automating the whole process is complex and the tremendous stress involved can weigh you down and affect your team’s efficiency. Therefore, Flosum offers one step rollback for instant/ near-zero downtime for you to roll back unwanted deployments with just one click to prevent production catastrophes. This, not only reduces human error, but also saves time while boosting efficiency.

Flosum's 1-click rollback
See how Flosum’s 1-click rollback saves time while boosting developer’s efficiency.

Flosum’s 1-Click Rollback

Flosum applies the principles of agility, scalability, and automation capabilities to create a paradigm shift in Salesforce application deployment with 1-click instant rollback. As a fully native all-in-one DevOps solution for requirements management, version control, deployments, and regression testing, Flosum makes deployment rollback a breeze. You can choose between:

  • Full Rollback
  • Partial Rollback
  • Cherry-picking specific components to roll back

This brings simplicity and transparency to deployment changes. It lets you see releases made to your app, who made them, and when they occurred. With Flosum’s 1-Click rollback you can simply hit the button at the first sign of trouble and have the system back up and running while you rectify the solution. This allows you to speed up deployment as well as maintain uptime for your application, giving you sufficient time to accurately diagnose and rectify the issue. The overarching goal is to automate rollbacks to make them as easy, predictable, and stress-free as possible.

How Flosum’s 1-Click Rollback Works

The first steps after you have committed your components to the branch include working through the Static Code Quality Analysis (APEX PNB), the Pull Request (For peers to review your code), and then initiating an Impact Analysis to ensure that there are no code overwrites when you proceed to deploy the code. Every time you trigger a validation, a deployment, a pipeline, or a rollback in Flosum, it is always going to be logged in your deployment history tab.

Flosum is never going to delete it, you forever have it for tracking purposes, and it can also be easily reported on. If for any reason the validation or deployment fails, you can always click on the zip file in the metadata log name to access a list of Salesforce errors that have occurred during deployment. When it succeeds, it lists all that’s updated, what’s been created and what’s changed.

Before Flosum deploys its components to the target org, it takes a backup of the components that are about to be changed. So, if for whatever reason, you later realize that the new change looks terrible or there is a need to revert to the previous version, you can simply use the metadata log to revert those changes back.

Similarly, let’s say you assign it to another Salesforce developer to do internal QA testing, and the developer gets back to you saying that the APEX class is terrible and it is breaking the account object, fields are all just wrong and it is simply not working. In such a case, if even the Salesforce developers and admins too seem clueless, and they need to roll back the deployment, Flosum offers a ‘Two Click Rollback’ with zero downtime. Moreover, you can roll back up to five deployments.

As discussed earlier, a special part about Flosum is that you can choose between a full and partial rollback or simply cherry-pick exactly the components you want to roll back. So, like the above use case, suppose the QA says that the trigger and the test class are terrible. You can then simply roll back the deployment. Flosum does this by using the zip file to quickly revert the changes back to the previous state before the deployment was made.

Looking for a more detailed guide on how Flosum’s 1-Click rollback works? Head over to the Flosum Community Portal for a step by step guide and make Salesforce DevOps amazingly simple.

How Flosum’s One Click Rollback Stands Out from the Competition?

Let’s say you had an accidental code overwrite over a page layout, probably overwrite a field introduction and it’s missing now. In that case, you can always roll back that page layout, the field will re-populate and the client can keep using that. Again, go to the sandbox and make the updates as needed and restart that process when you are ready. Here are three ways that Flosum’s Instant Rollback stands out from the competition.

  • Reverting Changes within the GIT Repository vs Flosum’s Two-click

Traditionally, if you need to revert a change, you would need to reverse the changes in the GIT repository by manually editing the XML code-based file. That’s not all… You’d also have to manually edit out the existing dependencies, which increases the confusion, room for human error, and risk of rework. Moreover, reverting changes in the GIT repository has a steep learning curve and can be intimidating for your Salesforce Admins. Secondly, since you are directly in the repository working on changes, there is room for human error.

What Flosum does is simplify the process of rollback and make it just another deployment task. It’s just requires taking just one branch and reverting the changes in just two clicks. Thus, it not only eliminates the need to manually make changes in the XML file in the GIT repository, or to look at what their dependencies are, what you need to update, what you need to remove, Flosum always knows that because that backup is there in your metadata log.

In my experience of using other competitor tools in the past, pre and post-destructive changes are a major pain. You have to package them up and it tends to cause issues. It is also really hard to automate that process. Flosum does manage to automate this process extremely well – even when you get merged branches into maybe a future branch or a release branch, it copies into them too really well, doing the heavy lifting to take the stress off deployment rollbacks.

  • Salesforce’s Familiar UI Makes Rollback Easy for Salesforce Admins

As a native application, Flosum leverages Salesforce’s familiar UI for all actions. This makes it easy enough for admins to understand, familiar to anyone using Salesforce’s lightning platform, and they can avoid going back to the GIT repository. Given the easy Salesforce lightning UI, with just a click of a button, admins can instantly revert to the old changes.

Flosum makes it super easy for Salesforce admins to understand what they are doing. So let say as an Admin, you want to change the Admin Account Page, rather than going to the GIT repository. Within Flosum, you can easily know the layout you want to move back and with just a click of a button, you can trigger a rollback just that change.

  • Eliminates Chances of Human Error

Although you can do partial rollback in the GIT repository, your Salesforce admins and developers will be manually editing the XML file which is code-based. It significantly increases the exposure to human error. Using Flosum, which comes with Salesforce’s familiar Lightning platform UI, you just have to pick what it is you want to roll back, and it’s done instantly. The room for human error is significantly reduced if not eliminated altogether.

  • Offers Metadata Log in deployment history tab for instant access anytime

Flosum always maintains a Metadata zip folder in the deployment history tab. So, if you ever feel the need to use it, or revert changes, you always have access to it anytime.

Benefits of Flosum’s 1-Click Salesforce Deployment Rollback

  • Instant Rollback with Zero Downtime

Allows you to shift the live production traffic quickly to different versions of the application without any downtime. Thus, you can rollback quickly at any time during the deployment process by redirecting to the older version of the application

  • Mitigates Deployment Risk

After testing a new feature in the application, you can gradually release the features to an increasing number of users incrementally over time. Because you do not roll out the complete application until it meets stability and performance requirements, it allows you to instantly shift between the environment without affecting your resources, which helps reduce your deployment risks.

  • Cost Optimization Benefits

It ensures that you are not tied to the same underlying resources. You can simply launch a more optimized environment if the performance envelope of the application changes from one version to another.

  • Ability To Test Real-Time Production Traffic

Rather than testing an application using simulated traffic, you can run live canary tests to decide in what increment you must release the new application.

Step up Your Productivity with Flosum’s Two Step Rollback

Flosum automates release management to help you reliably build, test and deploys the software to make the deployment process more efficient, reliable, and predictable. Although application deployment has associated risks and can be stressful, Flosum’s one-stop rollback helps mitigate risks and makes it easier for your Salesforce DevOps team to release faster, cost-effectively at scale, and with confidence.

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