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:

• Integration testing
• Regression testing
• Release preview testing

This environment is located at:

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

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 Disaster Recovery infrastructure in our secondary data center, running on bare metal as well.

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. Zuora customers can purchase any number of production copy environments, paying for each on an annual basis.

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.
• 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 (i.e. API keys, credit card numbers, etc.) 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, but prior to use.  Please see this section in the environment KC article to find out more details on what records are scrubbed.
• If you use the Multi-entity feature, sub-entities of the global entity are not copied from the production environment. This limitation applies when a new Production Copy Environment is provisioned and when an existing Production Copy Environment is refreshed. Zuora Global Services can assist customers to recreate sub-entities after provisioning or refreshing a Production Copy Environment.
• Some Zuora security features, such as SSO and MFA, and security compliance levels, such as, PCI, SOC, are not supported in Production Copy Environment.
• These environments currently do not include the following features:
  • Reporting
  • Insights
  • RevPro
  • Connect
  • Collect
  • Micro-service based features, such as Notifications on Any Event, Real-Time Usage Rating, and Orders UI

The use cases for Production Copy environments include:

• Regression testing

• System testing

• Data modeling

Large Production Copy Environments are available, with the following benefits:

• More redundancy at the application and message routing layer
• Read only database that run on SSD to offload export operations
• More granular batch processing for improved performance on Callouts, Export ZOQL, PDF Generation, Manual and Scheduled SFDC Sync.

Since these environments are provisioned on an as-needed basis, the URL endpoints vary.

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

Security

Provisioning Environments

To provision a Production Copy Environment or a Performance Test Environment, contact your Zuora representative. If you do not have a Zuora representative, submit a request at Zuora Global Support instead.

Please provide the following information:

• The type of testing environment that you would like to provision.
• In the case of a Production Copy Environment, the tenant ID of the production tenant that you would like Zuora to copy data from. See Managing Your Tenant Profile for how to find out the tenant ID.
• A name for the testing environment. This name will be displayed in the testing environment's banner.
• The email address of the person in your organization who will be the testing environment's administrator.

Your Zuora representative will send you an Order Form or an SOW for you to sign. After you have signed and returned the Order Form or SOW, Zuora will provision the testing environment.

The tenant activation email for the testing environment will be sent to the email address that you provided.