Salesforce introduces several new developer tools, including serverless functions

Salesforce has a bunch of announcements coming out of the virtual TrailheaDX conference taking place later this week, starting today with some new developer tools. The goal of these tools is to give developers a more modern way of creating applications on top of the Salesforce platform.

Perhaps the most interesting of the three being announced today is Salesforce Functions, which enable developers to build serverless applications on top of Salesforce. With a serverless approach, the developer creates a series of functions that trigger an operation. The cloud provider then delivers the exact amount of infrastructure resources required to run that operation and nothing more.

Wade Wegner, SVP of product for Salesforce and Salesforce DX, says the Salesforce offering gives developers a lot of flexibility around development languages such as Node.js or Java, and cloud platforms such as AWS or Azure. “I can just write my code, deploy it and let Salesforce operate it for me,” he said.

Wegner explained that the new approach lets developers build serverless applications with data that lives in Salesforce, and then run it on elastic infrastructure. This gives them the benefits of vertical and horizontal scale without having to be responsible for managing all aspects of how their application will run on the cloud infrastructure.

In addition to Functions, the company is also announcing Code Builder, a web-based IDE based on Microsoft Visual Studio Code Spaces. “By leveraging Visual Studio Code Spaces we can bring the same capabilities to developers right in the browser,” Wegner said.

He adds that this enables them to be more productive with support for many languages and frameworks in a browser in the context of the environment that they’re doing their work, while giving them a consistent and familiar experience.

Finally, the company is announcing the DevOps Center, which is a place to manage the growing complexity of delivering applications built on top of Salesforce in a modern continuous way. “It is really meant to provide new ways with which teams of developers can collaborate around the work that they’re doing, and to manage the complexities of continuously delivering applications…,” he said.

As is typical for Salesforce, the company is announcing these tools today, but they will not be generally available for some time. Functions and Code Builders are both in pilot, while DevOps Center will be available as a developer preview later this year.