12

If the staging environment is an isolated environment for testing by testers and also sandbox is an isolated environment for testing, So what are those differences? Actually I could not find any useful and clear information on.

Mohammad Jamal Dashtaki
  • 1,415
  • 1
  • 16
  • 23

1 Answers1

18

Good question. Given the background you provide they appear the same. This is true in that they are both isolated from the production environments. They should not contain production data. etc. However there are a number of differences particularly in how they are used.

  1. Staging environment

A good staging environment will be a close replica (less the data) of the production system. It is used to test upgrades and patches prior to going to production. This means that it should be a controlled environment where the engineers responsible for the production deployment are allowed to test the rollout instructions.

Access restrictions in a staging environment should be as close to production as possible. I.E. deployment by those engineers who are responsible for deployment. No root (or privileged access for developers).

  1. Sandbox environment

As the name suggests this typically a playground for the engineering team. It has less restrictions than a staging environment because it is designed to allow the engineers to try out things easily and quickly. A sandbox environment is likely to drift away from the production environment as engineers try out different versions of the product, dependancies, plugins etc.

Access to a sandbox environment typically allows privileged access to any engineer (developer, QA etc.) who are working on the project for easy / quick deployment and debugging.

James Wilson
  • 1,541
  • 7
  • 20
  • Thanks for your answer. As you told Sandbox has less restrictions than staging. Would you please tell me what those restrictions for example? – Mohammad Jamal Dashtaki Oct 03 '19 at 08:22
  • 1
    Thanks for the question. I have added a bit more information on this. Essentially I would expect a developer to have admin / privileged access to a sandbox environment but not a staging environment (as I wouldn't expect this for production). – James Wilson Oct 03 '19 at 10:02
  • some places I see term called "Test environment" , is it another name for sandbox? – kudlatiger Mar 16 '21 at 13:46
  • 1
    In my experience (sorry for very opinion based answer). Test environments are usually kept fairly clean for QA teams to test new features. Sandboxes are generally more of a playground for developers. – James Wilson Mar 17 '21 at 08:59