Announcing Multiple Sandboxes Open Beta and additional Sandbox updates

[#1]

Hello everyone,

My name is Branimir Kain, senior product marketing manager for Enterprise. Today, I’m excited to announce that Multiple Sandboxes, which allows for the creation of multiple sandboxes per product site, will transition from a closed beta to an open beta as of January 7th. All customers with a Cloud Enterprise plan will be auto-enrolled in the open beta.

Multiple Sandboxes will enable organizations to maintain more than one sandbox per product site. This feature will provide increased flexibility for implementing changes safely, supporting parallel testing, and adhering to industry-standard enterprise change management practices.

With the release of Multiple Sandboxes we will also be making two changes to the Sandbox experience that impact all plans with Sandboxes:

• a limit of 10 sandboxes per Cloud Enterprise product license.

• an update that ensures all sandboxes are associated with a Premium or Enterprise product license.

Multiple Sandboxes & Sandbox Limits - Open Beta

Benefits of Multiple Sandboxes

Multiple Sandboxes will allow organizations to have multiple sandboxes per product site. For example, an organization with two product sites requiring changes to pass through Development, Testing, and Staging before Production can now create three sandboxes for each product site:

For more details about Multiple Sandboxes please see https://support.atlassian.com/organization-administration/docs/open-beta-multiple-sandboxes/

More on Sandbox Limits

With the launch of Multiple Sandboxes, we’ll be introducing a limit of 10 sandboxes per Cloud Enterprise product license. These sandboxes can be assigned to any site(s) within an organization. For example, suppose a customer has a Jira Enterprise license and has four sites, with three sandboxes allocated to site one, two to site two, and four to site three. In that case, they won’t be able to create an additional sandbox as they’ve hit their limit of 10, as illustrated below.

Org admins will be able to see their current usage in Atlassian Administration (pictured below)

For more details about this change please see https://support.atlassian.com/organization-administration/docs/sandbox-limits/ and If you would like to opt out of the open beta, you can raise a ticket to Atlassian Support.

Ensuring Sandbox Alignment with Premium and Enterprise Product Plans - Generally Available

Sandboxes are only available to customers with a Premium or Enterprise plan; however, customers using either Jira or Jira Service Management (Jira Family)—were able to add Jira Family products that only had Free or Standard plans to a Sandbox, e.g.,

On Jan 7, 2025, it will no longer be possible to create sandboxes for products that only have a Free or Standard license, e.g.,

For now, all customers will be permitted to retain sandboxes that have products with Free or Standard licenses. However, once the Sandbox is deleted, it can't be recreated with products that only have Free or Standard plans. For more details about this change, please see.Jira family and sandboxes | Atlassian Support

Thank you for taking the time to learn about the changes we’re making to Sandboxes. We believe these enhancements will improve your experience and allow us to continue to innovate and evolve how your organizations use Sandboxes.

Please feel free to share your thoughts or ask any questions in the comments below.

Thanks,
Branimir Kain and the Atlassian Team

[Mathew Lederman]

Branamir,

Is this feature rolling out throughout the day? Or should it be available for all enterprise instances now?

[Marco Augusto Santinho Gonçalves]

Will automations and assets be migrated and/or updated? Because today it is somewhat unfeasible to keep both environments updated when many things do not come by default.

[Branimir Kain]

@Mathew Lederman, you can expect to see the changes take effect in about an hour (if not already) as it's deployed. 

[Branimir Kain]

@Marco Augusto Santinho Gonçalves , I'm not sure I fully understand your question. However, given my interpretation, this release will not impact the content of your Sandboxes. We are exploring  enhanced capabilities for Sandboxes expanding what can be copied on creation and how we can streamline the process of "promoting" changes to production.  All I can say right now is to keep an eye out on the public roadmap! 

[s_weber]

Branimir, I am so glad to see this coming out 🥳

I am also really excited for all the additional features this will enable in the future, to really make up an enterprise-grade-change-management strategy! 

As I told you in Barcelona, this would be of so much value for us! Please consider us for any EAP coming up next in this area, we are willing to invest the time!

Thanks a ton

Sascha

[Pablo Culebras _Jodocus_io_]

We have Enterprise Customers with 10+ Sites within their Org, which belong to child companies within the group with more coming up. Does this mean that these Sites won't have access to their own Sandbox environment, just because you are permitting other Sites to have multiple ones? Terrible news if it were like that...

[Matt Smith]

Nice but still Tone deaf to the user requests.

If you are adhering to standards then should you not be adding a free sandbox to the other tiers too?

I made a suggestion on how you may implement a more efficient application of sandboxes and yet even though this is WANTED by many (If you have not seen this then please vote !!!)

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-Service-Management/Sandbox-feature-for-Standard-Tier-Suggestion-raised-please-Vote/td-p/2606509 

Please grant the lower tiers the facility for at least one sandbox so you adhere to "Standards" in all your tiers !

KR,

Matt

[Branimir Kain]

@Pablo Culebras _Jodocus_io_ That's a correct understanding, though I'd like to add additional color. Yes, the Sandbox-to-Site has gone from a one-to-one to a many-to-one relationship, a shared pool that allows you to allocate Sandbox based on need across the entire organization. We analyzed historical Sandbox usage to understand the 99th percentile of concurrent Sandbox usage for our customers, leading us to this limit of 10. Without this limit, each site could create an infinite number of Sandboxes, which would degrade the Sandbox experience.

That being said, we're aware of the use case you're describing, where sites represent separate operating entities that don't talk to each other and need their own Sandbox environment.  We're currently exploring a solution that would allow customers to increase the size of their shared pool. However, that's something we're still exploring, and we are looking to have it as part of our GA of Multiple Sandboxes.

In the meantime, if this doesn't work for those customers you've described, your customers can opt out of this an Open Beta by reaching out to Atlassian Support.

[Branimir Kain]

@Matt Smith we understand the desire for Sandboxes in other plans; however, we don't plan to introduce something like that today. In their current form, sandboxes can't be included in every plan. We are exploring how we may address customer change management friction in the cloud; however, we're still exploring how to address that friction best. I would encourage you to keep an eye on our public roadmap.

Regarding standards, that is, "industry-standard enterprise change management practices," which specifically referred to allowing customers multiple sandboxes. This has historically been a need of our largest customers, who have legal and compliance requirements that necessitate such practices.   

I've already shared your JAC ticket with our PM @Swarna Mehta We appreciate the candor!

[Matt Smith]

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-Cloud-Admins-articles/Announcing-Multiple-Sandboxes-Open-Beta-and-additional-Sandbox/bc-p/2912797#M915

So basically you are saying that smaller customers should carry a high risk to their operations due to lack of test (sandpit environment).

The smaller customers are the least likely to be able to tolerate an outage or issue when something does not work as expected.

The approach I proposed would be a much better solution, that is available to ALL customers and ensures your solution is cost efficient for both sides (Probably more profitable to you !).

I am struggling to understand Atlassian's logic !?

Yours openly,
Matt

[Branimir Kain]

@Matt Smith , I wouldn't interpret my comments that way.

We're exploring how we may address the change management friction experienced by all of our customers in the cloud. However, many of the endeavors are still in exploration, so we don't have anything to share at this time.

I have shared your suggestion with our product manager.

[Jennifer Hecht]

Do premium subscriptions still only have one sandbox per product license? This is not made clear in this article.

[Branimir Kain]

@Jennifer Hecht that's correct. Multiple Sandboxes per site the feature is only available to the Cloud Enterprise plan.