Hi Atlassian Developer Community,
My name is Matt and I’m a product manager on the Atlassian Cloud team.
For those of you who don’t know, we launched our cloud sandbox experience to Premium and Enterprise customers back in October 2020. This gives customers the ability to create an isolated sandbox environment that can be used for safely testing and previewing changes. By default, a sandbox is empty when it’s created.
We recently launched data copying, which will allow customers to have a sandbox that mirrors their production environment as closely as possible, with a few caveats:
- Data copying for Jira includes all of the product data, excluding attachments and marketplace app data.
- Data copying for Confluence includes all of the product data and attachments, excluding marketplace app data.
- Data copying will fail if:
- the uncompressed XML file size is over 20GB (applies to Jira only).
- the production environment and linked sandbox are in different realms.
For more information about sandboxes, please read our official product documentation.
We would love to hear from our developer community on what other sandbox capabilities you see being beneficial. Is there anything you would like to see in the sandbox experience to make your apps more successful? Feel free to send me a direct message through the developer community or comment on this post directly.
Last but not least, there have been some questions sent to me directly from partners about sandboxes and I thought it would be good to reshare them for everyone’s benefit.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. How do apps get used and installed in sandboxes?
Sandbox sites work exactly the same as a production site in this regard. That means customers can install, trial, pay, and use apps the same way they would in a regular production site.
2. Are there plans to introduce free apps in sandbox?
We have plans to introduce functionality for Premium and Enterprise customers to have access to the apps they’ve already paid for in production. We are currently working out the details, including updates to our fair use policy to protect you and Atlassian from license abuse, and reporting needed so you have visibility into when your apps are being used in production vs sandbox.
3. What data is brought/not brought over as part of the data copying experience?
4. How long does a sandbox environment stay active?
A sandbox lifecycle is linked to the production site’s lifecycle, so if your production site is deleted or is no longer on a Premium plan, the corresponding sandbox will be destroyed. Users can delete sandboxes directly from admin hub (admin.atlassian.com) without impacting the production environment.
5. Are there any size limits on a sandbox?
No, users can have as much data in the sandbox as required. The process to bring data from production to a sandbox through the ‘ Copy from production ’ capability will fail if the size of the production environment is greater than 20GB (applicable to Jira only).
6. How many sandbox environments can a cloud customer have?
Customers can only create one sandbox for each linked product. For example, if you have a Jira Software production environment, you can only create one Jira Software sandbox.
7. What happens to an app if a sandbox is deleted?
If a sandbox is deleted, all app data and app licenses in the sandbox are erased.
8. How are sandbox site URLs generated? Can they be reused multiple times?
We generate a randomized site URL when the sandbox is created. Each sandbox site is affixed with -sandbox-{threeRandomDigits}
. For example, your sandbox site for acme.atlassian.net
would be acme-sandbox-952.atlassian.net
.
9. How does data copying work? Will it generate a new client key every time it’s used?
Our Jira data copy functionality uses the same backup & restore (i.e., site import/export) capabilities and restores the entire site, whereas Confluence relies on a newer service used by space by space import.
Because of this, a new client key would be created and associated with the data that’s copied into the sandbox site. However, given that we do not currently copy any app data over, this should not be an issue. We can also confirm that performing a data copy will not impact the client key used in the production site. Thus, the customer’s use of the app in their production site should not be disrupted.
10. How will I know when my sandbox is created and/or when my data copying is complete?
An email notification will be sent to you once these actions are complete.