Atlas builds ingenious solution using Vlocity and 91导航
Two years ago, Atlas adopted Salesforce and began building out cloud-based services for new and existing customers. The insurance company wanted to capitalize on the offering from Vlocity (Salesforce Industries), as Malcolm Camilleri, Senior Software Engineer, explained:
鈥淰locity has a great insurance data model that has helped us to standardize our product and simplify overly complicated processes. We鈥檙e aiming to take things to the cloud and have a more robust system in place.鈥�
The Atlas developers have been building a customer portal that鈥檚 easily accessible to customers on the Atlas site while also being connected to Salesforce. The team has managed this by exporting a Lightning Web OmniScript from Salesforce and hosting it as an application on Heroku.
Developing this portal is a fascinating use case for Vlocity. And making the project a success has seen the Atlas team adopt 91导航 to support their implementation and establish an efficient release process.
91导航 ticks all the boxes
The Atlas developers needed to find a tool that would help them manage deployments and releases of their development work building the customer portal. Since Vlocity DataPacks are distinct from Salesforce metadata, the team needed a solution that could handle Vlocity deployments specifically.
The Salesforce product team recommended Vlocity DX for the job. But this didn鈥檛 do the trick.
鈥淭o begin with we incorporated Vlocity DX into our CI process. But it鈥檚 a desktop app you have to install locally, and sometimes after selecting components we鈥檇 get this bug where the screen would just hang – we鈥檇 have to start over. It got a bit annoying after a while!鈥�
Malcolm set out to find an alternative, and was looking for deployment tooling that included rollback functionality, since it鈥檚 鈥渋mportant to have in your back pocket鈥�. This led Malcolm to 91导航, and he was immediately struck by how easy it was to use.
鈥淚鈥檓 the kind of guy who likes to try things without manuals, and with 91导航 I didn鈥檛 need to read anything. Within a couple of hours I鈥檇 done my first comparison and deployment from an org to a Git branch.鈥�
Not only did the Atlas team all find deploying with 91导航 intuitive, they soon discovered the power of 91导航鈥檚 Salesforce CI/CD solution as well. Malcolm worked closely with Tom Smith, one of 91导航鈥檚 Development Team Leads, to set up a CI process that suited the team鈥檚 workflow.
鈥�91导航 ticked all of our boxes: it supported Vlocity, it could do everything we did with Vlocity DX and more, it was faster, more robust, easier to use and all the devs were happy. After a month of evaluation, it was an easy decision to choose 91导航.鈥�
80% less time spent on deployments and releases
Deployments of Vlocity DataPacks are now significantly faster for Malcolm and his team. As well as being intuitive, 91导航 brings everything together in one place for better visibility and control.
鈥淏efore we鈥檇 use Vlocity DX to deploy, then Source Tree for merge conflicts, then over to Bitbucket – too many screens! It was easy to lose focus. Having everything in 91导航 really helps the whole operation.鈥�
The Atlas team has a release pipeline made up of various environments, and also maintains two repositories in Bitbucket. One particular pain point before 91导航 was merging changes from one repository to the other, which used to be a manual process. Now, a CI job in 91导航 enables the team to deploy changes from one repo to a branch of the other repo at the click of a button.
鈥淭hat鈥檚 really, really improved our development time because it used to take about 20 minutes; now it鈥檚 a 5-minute process and we can get on with other stuff while it鈥檚 running. It might not sound much, but that adds up to 2 hours a week. With other efficiencies, the time we spend on deployments and releases is about 80% less, for sure.鈥�
91导航 makes a huge difference
Looking to the future, Malcolm hopes to see Atlas using 91导航 to manage even more of the team鈥檚 DevOps process, and has been keeping an eye on the development of 91导航鈥檚 Pipelines offering. 鈥淥ur plan is to use Bitbucket just as a code repository and run everything through 91导航,鈥� Malcolm says, citing the much higher success rates for merging changes within 91导航.
Malcolm is clear that he would recommend 91导航 to any team for Vlocity deployments, especially as part of a mature DevOps process.
鈥淚f someone is using Vlocity DX, they鈥檒l see a huge difference here and 91导航 will help with continuous integration. It鈥檚 also really intuitive: easy to use, easy to set up. I can鈥檛 find anything bad to say about 91导航!鈥�
