Quick Clone for Sandboxes is now Generally Available on Hyperforce. In this blog post, I will provide you why you need this quick clone feature and how to use this in your org.

What Is Sandbox?

Salesforce is a powerful platform that allows businesses to manage their customer relationships, streamline processes, and automate tasks. However, with this power comes the potential for mistakes and errors that can lead to data loss or corruption. This is where sandboxes come in. In this blog note, we will discuss why sandboxes are essential in Salesforce.

A sandbox is an isolated environment within Salesforce where developers and administrators can test new changes or updates before deploying them to the live system. Sandboxes are copies of the production environment, which means that they contain the same metadata, data, and configurations. However, they are separate from the production environment and allow users to test and experiment with changes without affecting the live system.

Quick Introduction To Hyperforce

Hyperforce is a major re-architecture of Salesforce’s underlying technology infrastructure, designed to take advantage of the latest advancements in cloud computing, including distributed computing, edge computing, and virtualization. The goal of Hyperforce is to enable Salesforce to deliver its platform and applications to customers with the same level of performance, reliability, and security, regardless of where they are located or what devices they are using.

One of the key features of Hyperforce is that it allows Salesforce to run its platform on any public cloud infrastructure, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP), in addition to Salesforce’s own cloud infrastructure. This means that Salesforce can now offer its customers more choice and flexibility regarding where they want their data and applications to reside.

Please read my previous blog post where I explained in detail about Hyperforce. Click here.

Why We Need Quick Clone?

There are four different types of sandboxes available – Developer, Developer Pro, Partial Copy and Full. When we create these sandboxes, they get a copy of the production org’s metadata or metadata + data.

Now consider the scenario where your team is working on Sprints stories and their changes are promoted to UAT environment. At this stage, if there is any bug indefinite in Production org, it is very difficult for the team to reproduce the same in any lower environment, because all your lower environments are being updated with current sprint changes. With “clone” feature, you can create sandboxes from a “template sandbox” with desired metadata and sample data. And then with this new sandbox which is created through clone (will not have sprint changes), it will be much easier for your team to reproduce the bug and find the root cause. Now depending on number of clones required, the time taken to build these sandboxes can change.

This is where we need “Quick Clone”. This “Quick Clone” feature improves the performance of cloning process which in turn makes the sandbox creation process from “template sandbox” much faster.

Here are some reasons why this feature is useful:

1. Faster and Easier Testing: With the Quick Clone Sandbox feature, developers and testers can quickly create a copy of the production environment without having to go through a lengthy process of manually configuring and setting up a new sandbox.

2. Cost-Effective: Creating a new sandbox environment can be expensive, especially if you have multiple environments. Quick Clone Sandbox helps you to save money by enabling you to create new sandboxes on-demand, only when you need them.

3. Minimizes Risk: Creating a new sandbox environment can be risky if not done correctly. Quick Clone Sandbox reduces the risk of errors and configuration issues by providing an exact copy of the existing environment.

4. Eases Training and Learning: Quick Clone Sandbox makes it easy for new team members to get up to speed quickly by providing them with a copy of the production environment to practice on. This helps to minimize mistakes and ensures that everyone is working from the same starting point.

How To Check If My Org Is Enabled For “Quick Clone”?

You can go to Settings -> Environments -> Sandboxes to check whether your sandboxes are in Hyperforce Server or not. See the screenshot below. Any sandboxes created on Hyperforce are automatically enabled for Quick Clone. Clicking on the Clone button next to a Hypeforce-based sandbox will always use the “Quick Clone” to build the new sandbox rapidly.

Conclusion

Overall, the Quick Clone Sandbox feature in Salesforce provides a convenient way to create and manage multiple sandbox environments for testing, development, training, and other purposes, without the need for manual configuration and setup.

Disclaimer

This article is not endorsed by Salesforce, Google, or any other company in any way. I shared my knowledge on this topic in this blog post. Please always refer to Official Documentation for the latest information.