Customer

How Puppet Helps Salesforce Support Billions of Transactions Every Day

Salesforce is a cloud-based software company that empowers customer relationship management throughout the sales cycle. They turned to Puppet to improve their DevOps practices through infrastructure as code with some powerful results.

Benefits of Using Puppet:

  • End states are defined in one single code-base — not hundreds of different scripts.
  • Puppet finds and fixes anything that is out of compliance within the infrastructure, automatically.
  • Patching went from a full-team event to a single line of code that can be pushed out across all servers.
  • Puppet improved the full testing and deployment pipeline, speeding up development timelines. 
     

Lead software engineer Petersen Allen talks about automating the IT infrastructure that supports Salesforce.com’s 
vast cloud-based SaaS with Puppet, implementing DevOps practices, infrastructure as code, and more.

Challenge: Tens of Thousands of Nodes, Billions of Daily Transactions

Salesforce needed to support a staggering number of transactions and data from its customer base. This included tasks like building out data centers, applying patches, building and maintaining hosts, and ensuring compliance.  

Petersen Allen described the scope of just one of these tasks — patching — which the Salesforce IT handled via a “Patching Party” that took hours of work from multiple team members to accomplish. The manual work involved was as mighty as the size of the SaaS organization itself.  

Results: One Single Codebase, Faster Delivery

“At Salesforce, customer success is their number-one priority, which makes the success of our infrastructure my number-one priority.” - Petersen Allen, Lead Software Engineer at Salesforce

With Puppet’s single code-base across the entire Salesforce infrastructure, labor-intensive and manual tasks are replaced by infrastructure as code. For the “Patching Party,” this meant that the team could enjoy an actual party — all while one line of code applied patches to their servers.

This single code-base makes it easier to analyze code in one location, without teams needing to search through hundreds of different scripts. It also means that the team can predict end states, which adds consistency across the infrastructure.

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Puppet improved Salesforce’s testing and deployment pipeline, all while ensuring compliance and keeping up with their fast-paced IT needs.

See for yourself what Puppet can do for you. Try it today or request a demo with the Puppet team.

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