Introduction to Sandboxes

Sandbox is a copy of your production organization. You can create multiple copies of your organization in separate environments for different purposes such as development, testing and training, without compromising the data and applications in your production organization.

Sandboxes are completely isolated from your Salesforce production organization, so operations you perform in your sandboxes do not affect your Salesforce production organization, and vice versa.

Generally in each phase of project requires different environments like during construction phase there are chances to multiple teams will work on development in this case each team requires their own sandboxes for development. After the construction period we need one common testing environment, during training period training team requires separate environment for training purpose and before going to production one STAGING environment required. So for each phase different environments are required.

To understand this see the following SDLC diagram.





Development Life Cycle

1. Create development environments.

2. Develop using Salesforce Web and local tools.

3. Create testing environments, including UAT and integration.

4. Migrate changes from development environment to integration environment.

5. Test.

6. Migrate changes from integration environment to UAT environment.

7. Perform user-acceptance tests.

8. Migrate changes from UAT environment to staging environment.

9. Replicate production changes in staging environment.

10. Schedule the release.

Types of Sandboxes

Salesforce now providing four types of sandboxes.

1. Developer Sandbox

2. Developer Pro Sandbox

3. Partial Data Sandbox

4. Full Sandbox

Developer Sandbox

Developer sandbox is a copy of production, it copies all application and configuration information to the sandbox. This type of sandboxes limited to 200MB of test or sample data, which is enough for many development and testing tasks. You can refresh a developer sandbox once per day.

Developer Pro Sandbox

Developer Pro sandboxes copy all of your production organization’s reports, dashboards, price books, products, apps, and customizations under Setup, but exclude all of your organization’s standard and custom object records, documents, and attachments. This type of sandboxes limited to 1GB of test or sample data. We can refresh developer pro type sandboxes once per day.

Partial Data Sandbox

A Partial Data sandbox is a Developer sandbox plus the data you define in a sandbox template. It includes the reports, dashboards, price books, products, apps, and customizations under Setup (including all of your metadata). Additionally, as defined by your sandbox template, Partial Data sandboxes can include your organization’s standard and custom object records, documents, and attachments up to 5 GB of data and a maximum of 10,000 records per selected object. A Partial Data sandbox is smaller than a Full sandbox and has a shorter refresh interval. You can refresh a Partial Data sandbox every 5 days.

Sandbox templates allow you to pick specific objects and data to copy to your sandbox, so you can control the size and content of each sandbox. Sandbox templates are only available for Partial Data or Full sandboxes.

Full Copy Sandbox

Full copy sandboxes are exact copy of production including standard and custom objects records, attachments and documents. You can refresh full copy sandbox every 29 days.

Salesforce developer Account

Salesforce providing free developer edition where you can develop force.com applications for free.

Salesforce provides many editions based on the customers needs. Each edition has their own features. Following are the paid editions providing by salesforce.

Contact Manager, Group, Professional, Enterprise and Unlimited.

In developer edition we can have access to Apex, visualforce, the Force.com Integration APIs, Force.com sites, the database services and much more.

Following are licences available in developer edition.

- 2 Salesforce CRM licences

- 2 salesforce mobile licences

- 3 salesforce platform licences

- 5 salesforce partner licences

- 10 salesforce ccustomer portal licences

Limits of developer edition

- 5.0 MB of data storage

- 20 MB of file storage

- 5000 API requests per 24 hours perion

- Any number of applications

- A 500 MB bandwidth and 10 minute service request time limits ( per rolling 24 hours) for force.com site applications.

Creating Salesforce developer edition account

Go to http://developer.force.com/ and click on “JOIN NOW” button then you will navigate to registration page. Fill your details, make sure that your user name should be in email format. After filling all the details click on sign me up. Then you will navigate to following page.



Next open your email and check your mailbox, you will get mail notification from salesforce, you have click that link and set your password.

Now you are in salesforce developer edition. Here you can create your own applications, you can customize standard application.

Introduction about Cloud Computing

“What’s the cloud?” “Where is the cloud?” “Are we in the cloud now?!” These are all questions you’ve probably heard or even asked yourself. Now new trend in IT is Cloud computing.

In the simplest terms, cloud computing means storing and accessing data and programs over the Internet instead of your computer’s hard drive.

What cloud computing is not about is your hard drive. When you store data on–or run programs from the hard drive, that’s called local storage and computing. Everything you need is physically close to you, which means accessing your data is fast and easy (for that one computer, or others on the local network). Working off your hard drive is how the computer industry functioned for decades and some argue it’s still superior to cloud computing, for reasons I’ll explain shortly.

The cloud is also not about having a dedicated hardware server in residence. Storing data on a home or office network does not count as utilizing the cloud.

For it to be considered “cloud computing,” you need to access your data or your programs over the Internet, or at the very least, have that data synchronized with other information over the Net. In a big business, you may know all there is to know about what’s on the other side of the connection; as an individual user, you may never have any idea what kind of massive data-processing is happening on the other end. The end result is the same: with an online connection, cloud computing can be done anywhere, anytime.

Life before cloud computing

Traditional business applications have always been very complicated and expensive. The amount and variety of hardware and software required to run them are daunting. You need a whole team of experts to install, configure, test, run, secure, and update them.

When you multiply this effort across dozens or hundreds of apps, it’s easy to see why the biggest companies with the best IT departments aren’t getting the apps they need. Small and mid-sized businesses don’t stand a chance.
Cloud computing: a better way

With cloud computing, you eliminate those headaches because you’re not managing hardware and software—that’s the responsibility of an experienced vendor like salesforce.com. The shared infrastructure means it works like a utility: You only pay for what you need, upgrades are automatic, and scaling up or down is easy.

Cloud-based apps can be up and running in days or weeks, and they cost less. With a cloud app, you just open a browser, log in, customize the app, and start using it.

Businesses are running all kinds of apps in the cloud, like customer relationship management (CRM), HR, accounting, and much more. Some of the world’s largest companies moved their applications to the cloud with salesforce.com after rigorously testing the security and reliability of our infrastructure.

As cloud computing grows in popularity, thousands of companies are simply rebranding their non-cloud products and services as “cloud computing.” Always dig deeper when evaluating cloud offerings and keep in mind that if you have to buy and manage hardware and software, what you’re looking at isn’t really cloud computing but a false cloud.

Characteristics of Cloud Computing

On-demand: Resources should be always available when you need them, and you have control over turning them on or off to ensure there’s no lack of resource or wastage happen.

Scalable: You should be able to scale (increase or decrease the resource) when necessary. The cloud providers should have sufficient capacity to meet customer’s needs.

Multi-tenant: Sometimes you may be sharing the same resource (e.g. hardware) with another tenant. But of course, this is transparent to the customer. Cloud provider shall responsible the security aspect, ensuring that one tenant won’t be able to access other’s data.

Self-service computation and storage resource: Related processes including: billing, resource provisioning, and deployment should be self-service and automated, involving much less manual processing. If a machine where our service is hosted fails, the cloud provider should be able to failover our service immediately.

Reliability: Cloud provider should be able to provide customer reliability service, committing to uptimes of their service.

Utility-based subscription: You will pay the cloud provider as a utility based subscription, just like paying your electricity bill – without any upfront investment.
Service models in cloud computing

1. Infrastructure as a service (IaaS)

2. Platform as a service (PaaS)

3. Software as a service (SaaS)

4. Network as a service (NaaS)




Service Models in cloud computing
Cloud computing Types

A public cloud is one based on the standard cloud computing model, in which a service provider makes resources, such as applications and storage, available to the general public over the Internet. Public cloud services may be free or offered on a pay-per-usage model.

A private cloud is designed to offer the same features and benefits of public cloud systems, but removes a number of objections to the cloud computing model including control over enterprise and customer data, worries about security, and issues connected to regulatory compliance.

A hybrid cloud is a composition of at least one private cloud and at least one public cloud. A hybrid cloud is typically offered in one of two ways: a vendor has a private cloud and forms a partnership with a public cloud provider, or a public cloud provider forms a partnership with a vendor that provides private cloud platforms.