We’re excited to announce that we just released the first version of Sandbox.
Sandbox is a tool that enables software teams to easily create reproducible development and testing environments. Some of our key goals for Sandbox are:
- Allow teams to create and work with reproducible environments. No more “Works on [my local|dev|test] environment”
- Easy to learn. We want teams to use Sandbox without having to learn an entirely new set of terminology, concepts, and skills around defining and managing environments. We integrate tightly with Git so you can use everything your team knows about working with Git. Launch environments directly from Git branches.
- Run environments directly on developer and QA machines. Teams need to test applications throughout the development life-cycle – during development, QA, and beyond. Sandbox allows anyone on the team to reproduce an environment on their own machine with the click of a button, without having to rely on anyone else. This empowers everyone on the team to create test environments whenever they need, however many they need, and for any Git branch.
This is how we see Sandbox being able to help the different team members involved in a project:
- All members: hit the ground running from the first minute after they join a new project. You no longer need a long on-boarding process of several days for team members to set up their local environments. You no longer need to waste time keeping internal Wikis up to date, etc. New team members install Sandbox, point to your team’s Git repo and they’re up and running
- DevOps: No more time spent creating testing environments for teams – this time can be spent on production related topics instead.
- Developers: Reduce, or remove altogether, time spent in managing environments. Once they sign off the environment configuration as part of their feature branch work, all team members will benefit from this effort on any environment they launch.
- QAs: No more waiting for environments to be setup or updated, allowing them to create their own testing environments at the click of a button!
- PMs: Reduce the overhead of managing and coordinating teams involved in making the required testing environments available for a release.
It’s been quite a journey, but we’re very proud of the results. Check it out and let us know your thoughts! You can download it here:
Stacks and Foundations 