Sandboxes and Scratch Orgs with Rohit Mehta

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Rohit Mehta, Senior Product Manager for Sandboxes and Scratch Orgs at Salesforce.

Join us as we talk about how to think about sandboxes and scratch orgs and some tips for how to use them better.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Rohit Mehta.

Diving into sandboxes

We’ve talked a lot about why sandboxes are so important for admins over the years, but we’ve never really gotten into the nitty-gritty of it. That’s why for this episode, we thought we’d bring on the sandbox PM, Rohit, to talk through everything.

Rohit has been at Salesforce for a long time, first as a computer engineer and then later on the product side of things. In fact, he says, “a lot of the product that I manage nowadays I actually built, years ago.” Since he took over the team, there have been a lot of improvements to what sandboxes have to offer, including upgrades to speed and reliability, data masking, and partial sandboxes, and the future is looking even more exciting.

Hyperforce and the need for speed

One big thing coming up is sandboxes for Hyperforce. If you’re not familiar, Hyperforce is a Salesforce deployment on public cloud infrastructure (like AWS). “One of the most common complaints that we get from customers is that their sandbox takes too long to create,” Rohit says, “but now with Hyperforce, we can produce sandboxes much much faster due to a newly-rearchitected design.”

They’re starting with Quick Clone for Dev and Dev Pro sandboxes coming up in Winter ‘23, with an eye towards a GA release in Spring ‘23 (forward-looking statement!). The Create operation will be coming along shortly after, so lots to look forward to. “People don’t often think about speed as a feature,” Rohit says, “but we make speed improvements on every release.” And the goal with Hyperforce is to be able to create sandboxes an order of magnitude faster than before. That’s 10x, for those of you playing along from home.

Check out scratch orgs

Rohit is also the product manager for scratch orgs, so we figured he’s perhaps the best person in the world to ask this question: what’s the difference between sandboxes and scratch orgs? scratch org is a source-driven and disposable deployment of Salesforce code and metadata. A scratch org is fully configurable, allowing developers to emulate different Salesforce editions with different features and preferences, and they only last 30 days. Sandboxes are copies of your Salesforce org that you can use for development, testing, and training, without compromising the data and applications in your production org.

Source-based development can really improve the speed that you’re able to deliver complex projects, so Rohit encourages every admin to give scratch orgs a closer look. While creating one through the CLI may seem complicated, there are a lot resources out there to help you make it happen, and new declarative options are on the way.

Podcast swag

• Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Learn more:

• Trailhead: Set Up a Sandbox in Your Salesforce Org
• Trailhead: Use Sandboxes to Manage Change
• Salesforce Developer Documentation: Scratch Orgs

Social

• Rohit: @RohitForce
• Salesforce Admins: @SalesforceAdmns 
• Gillian: @GillianKBruce
• Mike: @MikeGerholdt