Zuora Testing Environments

API Sandbox

The API Sandbox is Zuora's "release preview" environment. It is a customer facing, multi-tenant environment that gets code deployed to it before Zuora's production environment. How early code gets deployed depends on the type of release: Major releases are usually deployed a week in advance, whereas minor releases and emergency patches get deployed days, hours or minutes before production. Zuora customers can purchase any number of tenants in this environment for a recurring annual fee.

API Sandbox is co-located in the same data center as the production environment, running on bare metal, but on a smaller footprint, offering less capacity.

The main use cases for API Sandbox include:

• Basic implementation configuration and integrations
• Training
• Integration testing
• Regression testing
• Release preview testing

This environment is located at:

• US Data Center - https://apisandbox.zuora.com/
• US Cloud Data Center - https://sandbox.na.zuora.com/
• EU Cloud Data Center - https://sandbox.eu.zuora.com/

Zuora Central Sandbox

Zuora Central Sandbox combines the capability to copy production data along with production-like performance into a single test environment tenant.  While Zuora Central Sandbox always comes with a snapshot of scrubbed production data, it can also be utilized for a brand new implementation in case the production tenant has no data at that time.  The use cases for Zuora Central Sandbox include everything that an API Sandbox does, and more:

• Basic implementation configuration and integration

• Training

• Integration testing

• Regression testing

• Performance testing (with guidelines)

• Pre-production testing

• User acceptance testing 

Zuora Central Sandbox is hosted on a production-like AWS infrastructure, allowing our customers to test the API response time, the bill runs and payment runs with production-level data loading. It provides a more realistic view of performance than API Sandbox.

While the Zuora Central Sandbox is designed for production-level performance, Zuora recommends you to contact Zuora Global Support if you plan to test over a certain amount of volume in a 24 hour period in the Zuora Central Sandbox. See Performance guidelines for the details.

In addition, the testing results can still vary from Production since both the Zuora Central Sandbox and Production are distinct multi-tenant environments, the performance of which are based on the overall usage across all your customers.

This environment is located at:

• For the US Data Center customers: https://test.zuora.com
• For the EU Data Center customers: https://test.eu.zuora.com 

Note that the support for EU Data Center customers is currently on a limited basis only.  Contact Zuora Global Support or your account manager for more information.

Zuora Central Sandbox has the following limitations:

• Beta or Early Adopter features may not be supported. Contact Zuora Global Support or your account manager for more information.
• Zuora Central Sandbox is currently hosted in the US only.
• While Zuora Central Sandbox supports the capability to create and save reports in the Reporting tool, the saved reports in the production environment are currently not copied to Zuora Central Sandbox.

Performance Test Environment

The Performance Test Environment is Zuora's de-facto Performance Test environment. It's the multi-tenant environment which we recommend customers and partners to use for extensive performance testing and trying to test the integration with Zuora or identify bottlenecks with an integration. Zuora customers can purchase any number of tenants in this environment, paying for them on a monthly basis.

Code releases are deployed to Performance Test Environment shortly after they are deployed to the production environment, typically a few minutes after production deployment, keeping the Performance Test environment in close parity with production.

The environment is co-located with our Production infrastructure.

The main use cases for the Performance Test Environment include:

• Performance load testing
• End to end timing testing (especially for data migrations)

This environment is located at https://pt1.zuora.com

Production Copy Environment

The Production Copy Environment is an isolated customer sandbox, containing a scrubbed snapshot of customer data from Zuora's production environment, running completely on AWS on a significantly smaller capacity/footprint Zuora stack with the same release version as production. These environments are also referred to as "Service Environments". This is the only environment which supports scrubbed data and configuration copy from production.

The Production Copy Environment has some unique characteristics:

• The Production Copy Environment are run on a best-effort basis, and do not have a guaranteed up-time or performance.

• Customers are responsible for managing the schedule of refreshes of their environments. This includes coordinating the refresh to include a new Zuora version and data snapshot. Without careful management, service environments may lag in code and data version when compared to customer's production tenant. See Refresh Policy for more information.

  Enhanced Production Copy Environment is updated along with Production. Such updates typically involve code changes only and do not refresh existing customer data.

• Provisioning or refreshing to a Production Copy Environment typically takes 5 business days, but the process may take longer. For instance, provisioning a Production Copy Environment may take longer than 5 business days if a large volume of data needs to be extracted from the production environment and scrubbed.

• Various sensitive parts of production-copied data (such as API keys, credit card numbers, email addresses, and so on) are scrubbed as part of the environment provisioning process. This typically means customers need to perform some level of data grooming after an environment is provisioned or refreshed, prior to using.  See Scrubbed Data for more details on what records are scrubbed.

• Some Zuora security features, such as SSO and MFA, and security compliance levels, such as PCI and SOC, are not supported in Production Copy Environment.

• Production Copy environments currently do not include the following features:

  • Reporting
  • Insights
  • Zuora Revenue (formerly known as Zuora RevPro)
  • Marketplace (formerly known as Zuora Connect)
  • Collect
  • Micro-service based features, such as Notifications on Any Event, and Orders UI

• Enhanced Production Copy environments support the following features that a basic Production Copy Environment does not support:

  • Reporting

  • OAuth authentication via REST API

  • Copying multiple entities

  • Data Model

  • Settings API

  • Data Query

  • Event Triggers and Notifications

  • Workflow, Collect, and Marketplace

• Currently, Enhanced Production Copy environments have the following limitations:

  • Customers are limited to only 1 enhanced production copy per production tenant.

  • Enhanced Production Copy environments only copy core billing data from production environments.  Data copy for new features, such as Data Model, is not yet supported.

  • ePCE supports hosting on US and EU data centers.

  • Features that are still in development are not supported.

For more information, see Support for Zuora Features, Add-ons, Integrations.

The use cases for Production Copy environments include:

• Regression testing

• System testing

• Data modeling

Since these environments are provisioned on an as-needed basis, the URL endpoints for the REST API may vary. Once your environment is provisioned, check with Zuora Global Support which REST API endpoint you should used.

General Information

Refresh Policy

Zuora performs two types of refreshes: A refresh for a new Zuora version and a data snapshot refresh.

Scrubbed Data

Zuora scrubs or cleans data that is copied to the Production Copy Environment to remove sensitive information. The following table provides a summary of the data that is scrubbed.

Support for Zuora Features, Add-ons, Integrations

Zuora features, add-ons, and integrations are generally supported except where noted in the following table:

Limits Policy

If Customer’s use of the Service exceeds the usage limits in the applicable contracts or as described in this Knowledge Center article for any products provided, Customer must either purchase additional usage, if applicable, or move to the next edition of the Service. If Customer does not choose either of the options, Customer shall be considered out of compliance with such Service.

Security

Zuora is committed to safeguarding the security, confidentiality, integrity, and availability of all physical and electronic information assets of the Company to ensure that regulatory, operational, and contractual requirements are fulfilled. Zuora's internal controls are benchmarked against industry standards such as ISO27001, ISO27018, PCI DSS Level 1, SOC 1, SOC 2 and HIPAA. Zuora Central Sandbox will be included in future ISO27001, ISO27018, PCI DSS Level 1, SOC 1, SOC 2 and HIPAA assessments starting in the fall of 2020. 

Provisioning and Refreshing Your Data

Zuora provides the following guidelines for provisioning and data refresh turnaround times for Test Environments.  We continuously strive to optimize performance and provide the best possible turnaround times for you.

When a Zuora Central Sandbox is provisioned, it will execute a data copy process that brings over a snapshot of your production data, with sensitive and P2I data scrubbed. Subsequently, every data refresh request will take a new snapshot of your scrubbed production data.  In both cases, the complete snapshot of your production data are as of the date and time when the request is submitted, as the data copy process will be triggered at a time after your request is made.

While the data copy for most tenants can be completed within less than 3 business days, it can take a longer time to complete the data copy for large tenants. In addition, the process may also take longer during the first week of a month, a peak time of data refresh requests to get a full data snapshot of the previous month.