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Zuora Testing Environments

Zuora environments represent private tenant access to the Zuora application, APIs, and supported integrations and payments gateways. This article describes the different types of Zuora testing environments and is targeted to help you determine the right environment for your needs.

Zuora offers the following testing environments:

  • API Sandbox

    Intended for integration testing and release preview testing. Does not come with any data. Zuora application version is one week ahead of the main production environment.

  • Production Copy Environment

    Intended for system testing and data modeling. Comes with a copy of your production data. Zuora application version is refreshed on demand to match the main production environment.

  • Performance Test Environment

    Intended for heavy performance testing and load testing. Does not come with any data. Zuora application version is refreshed a few minutes after updates to the main production environment.

You can access the main production environment at https://www.zuora.com.

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:

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

Support Responsibility for the Performance Test Environment

Zuora Responsibility Customer Responsibility
  • Provision a tenant for use by the customer.
  • Enable customer features per entitlement.
  • Monitor the environment for internal operations.
  • Respond to customer inquiries about performance degradations that customers see from their end.
  • Respond to customer inquiries about functional problems they encounter in the environment.
  • Set up your tenant with all administrative settings, user roles, and integrations and configurations. All Zuora application settings must be configured to match your Zuora production tenant.
  • Copy your product catalog.
  • Populate your tenant with test data.
  • Execute performance tests.
  • Monitor end-user performance of your tests for your own purposes.

Production Copy Environment

The Production Copy Environment is isolated customer sandboxes, 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 used to be referred to as "Service Environments". This is the only environment which supports scrubbed configuration and data 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:

  • Customers are responsible for managing the timing of refreshes of their environments. Without careful management, service environments may lag in code and data version when compared to customer's production tenant.
  • Environment provisioning and refreshes are not instantaneous. They usually take between a couple of days to up to five business days to provision/refresh and are dependent on the volume of data being extracted and scrubbed from Zuora's production environment.
  • 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.
  • 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 certain features, such as Reporting and Insights.

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.

The Production Copy Environment is provisioned as below:

  1. After signing this SOW and emailing it to Orders@zuora.com, the customer must submit a request with Zuora Global Support (support@zuora.com) to provision the NP AWS services environment.

  2. It takes approximately 5 business days to provision a services environment. A response will be provided within 48 business hours.

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

General Information

  API Sandbox Production Copy Environment Performance Test Environment
Does this sound like you?
  • I just want to test soon-to-be released features.
  • I want to perform data migration  functional testing for a small customer base.
  • I want to test features in an isolated environment using my own data.

  • I want to perform small scale data migration functional testing to validate functionality.
  • I want to perform bill runs timing load tests for an expected increase in volume.
  • I want to perform data migration timing tests.
Suitable for

Previewing and functional testing new Zuora features before they are released to Production.

Functional testing with cloned configuration and data.

 

Heavy-load performance and stress testing.
Not Suitable for Performance and load testing Performance and load testing Functional testing
Data Migration Testing Yes
Suitable for less than 100,000 records		 Yes
Required for a few thousand records		 Yes
An example of 100,000 records = 50,000 accounts + 50,000 subscriptions. 
Infrastructure Mimics Production No No Yes
Includes Environment Monitoring Yes No

 

 No
See Support Responsibilities for the Performance Test Environment at the end of this article for more information.
Rollback Policy Rollbacks are not supported on any environment. Zuora recommends that you revert changes yourself – if possible. Reverting changes are possible before posting transactions on a bill run. 
Hardware Bare metal (non-virtualized) environment. Does not have 1-to-1 relationship with the production environment.

Configuration varies and is based on the number of servers and the specification of each server.

 Virtualized Bare metal (non-virtualized) environment. Has a 1-to-1 relationship with the production environment.
Location apisandbox.zuora.com servicesn.zuora.com
where n is a number allocated during provisioning		 PT1.zuora.com

Refresh Policy

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

  API Sandbox Production Copy Environment Performance Test Environment
Refreshed with New Zuora Version Yes
Automatically refreshed monthly one week before the production release. Maintain releases are shorter than one week.

On demand. Refresh limited to once monthly.

Refresh does not follow the production release schedule.

Note: If you request a refresh for a new Zuora version, a data refresh will also occur.

Yes
Automatically refreshed monthly. Refresh follows the production release schedule.

Maintenance releases also occur in this environment. Follow same production release schedule.
Includes Scrubbed Data Copied from Production No

You are responsible for loading your data, including creating user logins and global tenant settings.

 On demand. Refresh limited to once monthly.

Scrubbed data includes user logins and global settings.

Note: If you request a new data refresh, a new Zuora version will also occur.

 No

You are responsible for loading your own data, including user logins and global tenant settings.
Historical PDF-generated Invoices

No

You must generate PDF invoices from scratch.

No

You must regenerate any previously generated PDF invoices in this environment

No

You must generate PDF invoices from scratch.
Contact

To request a refresh or get more info on Zuora's refresh policy, submit a request at Zuora Global Support and include ENVIRONMENT in the subject heading.

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.

  API Sandbox Production Copy Environment Performance Test Environment
Personal Settings N/A

User’s work email address.
Note: Email addresses are replaced with benign information or dummy data.

 N/A
Commerce
Zuora for Salesforce - 360 Sync N/A Salesforce Credentials N/A
Billing & Payments
Customer Account N/A Bill To and Sold To Contact information:
  • Work and Personal Email
  • Work, Mobile, Home and Other phone numbers, and Address fields
  • Default Payment Method plus any Electronic Payment Methods
 N/A
Payment Gateways N/A Payment Gateway credentials N/A
Payment Pages (HPM 2.0) N/A

RSA Public Key, RSA Private Key

 N/A
Hosted Payment Method Pages (HPM 1.0) N/A API Security Key N/A
Notifications and Callouts N/A Callout Base URL N/A
Finance
NetSuite N/A

NetSuite integration credentials

 N/A

Support for Zuora Features, Add-ons, Integrations

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

  API Sandbox   Production Copy Environment Performance Test Environment
Notifications Yes

Yes

Contact Global Support if you want to disable email notifications.

Notifications related to new users, password resets, and email address changes are always enabled and cannot be disabled.

 Yes
Callouts Yes Yes Yes
Single Sign-on Yes No Yes
Two-factor Authentication Yes No Yes
Reporting Yes

No

 Yes
New Invoice File Generation Service Yes

Yes

Submit a request at Zuora Global Support to enable this feature or service.

 Yes
New Quote File Generation Service Yes

Yes

 Yes
Add-ons and Integrations

Zuora for Salesforce

 Yes Yes Yes
Zuora requires a 1-to-1 relationship with Salesforce for each Zuora environment.
Real-time Sync Yes Yes Yes
Z-Suite Yes Yes

Submit a request at Zuora Global Support to enable this feature or service.

 Yes

You must submit a request at Zuora Global Support to setup and enable.
Avalara Connector Yes Yes

Submit a request at Zuora Global Support to enable this feature or service.

 Yes

You must submit a request at Zuora Global Support to set up and enable the Avalara Connector.
Payment Gateways Yes
Includes any gateway that is supported in production

Yes
Includes only test gateways

You cannot use production data to simulate payment runs or update payment methods in the Production Copy Environment. 

Do the following to simulate a payment run in this environment:

  1. Set up a new gateway and set up new payment methods.
  2. Set a new default payment method in customer accounts.
  3. Create a simulated payment run.
 Yes
Includes any gateway that is supported in production
Insights No No No

Limits Policy

  API Sandbox Production Copy Environment Performance Test Environment
Concurrent Request Limits Bounded by Policy Not Bounded by Policy Bounded by Policy

Security

  API Sandbox Production Copy Environment Performance Test Environment
PCI-compliant Yes No
Customers accept compliance risks		 Yes
Akamai Web Application Firewall and Acceleration Services Yes
for the US Data Center tenants		 No No
SOC 1 and SOC 2-compliant Yes No Yes
HIPAA-compliant Yes No Yes
IP Whitelist Yes Yes Yes
Two-factor Authentication Yes No Yes

Access to Environment

  API Sandbox Production Copy Environment Performance Test Environment
Provisioning Turnaround None
Immediate with logins

Yes
Up to 5 business days

See Production Copy Environment Description at the bottom of this article for additional information.

 Yes
Up to 5 business days
SOW Required No Yes Yes
Included with Platform Fee? Yes
Number of instances depends on the Zuora Edition		 No
Purchase as an add-on		 No
Purchase as an add-on
Contact

To get access to these environments, submit a request at Zuora Global Support and include ENVIRONMENT in the subject heading.
Last modified
09:47, 23 Jun 2017

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