how does addon licensing on cloud sandbox work

[Girish_Shenoy]

I have a requirement from customer where, customer wants to follow proper change management for any changes done to JIRA Software cloud.

Sandbox is one option, however, since Add-ons wont be present in Sandbox. one option is install trial and do it. However since customer wants this regularly for change management. What is the alternate option?

Do we ask customer to purchase 10 user cloud instance with all the Add-ons so that change requests can be tested and then deployed to production? 

OR 

Will plugin vendors provide token code to keep the add-ons in trial mode in sandbox.

[Andy Heinzer]

Hi,

I understand that you are looking for alternatives to using the Sandbox feature because these do not include your 3rd party apps or their respective data.  At the moment, the best recommendation is to leverage trial versions of these apps in your sandbox environments.  This is mentioned in Add Marketplace and Atlassian apps to a sandbox 

It might be possible to instead use a 10 user site, but Marketplace vendors are not required to offer indefinite free trials for their products at this time.  So you would have to account for the licensing of any apps that you manually add to the sandbox instance.  This is one reason why the sandboxes using trials tends to be the preferred route, even if this effectively time locks those apps to 30 day evaluation trials for the apps.  You could try to reach out to the app vendor directly in order to see if you could obtain a license for the sandbox as well, but be aware that the app vendor is not obligated at this time to provide a sandbox license for free even if you have a current paid subscription.

There is also more information on the Release Tracks feature that corresponds to using sandboxes that might be helpful to review.

I understand if this is not an ideal long term solution for all sandbox use cases, but the sandboxes and release tracks are still very new features within Atlassian Cloud and we are working to improve these across a couple of different angles.

[Derek White]

Adding apps to Cloud sandbox often times results in the App being unable to retrieve a license and it uninstalls itself after ~10min of trying.

This is not a good solution.

[Andy Heinzer]

Hi @Derek White I'd recommend creating a support request with us at https://support.atlassian.com/contact when you see this happen.

[Derek White]

@Andy HeinzerThanks for the verification that is should work! Our site is hit by the outage, will see if the sandbox logs are restored (it stayed up almost a week longer than our prod, but started showing as deleted late last week). If not, I will try to replicate and open a ticket. Thanks!

[Andy Heinzer]

Hi Derek,

I didn't realize your site was affected by that outage.  I can see that your team has an existing ticket for that outage over in https://getsupport.atlassian.com/servicedesk/customer/portal/48/PCS-90378 I will make a note on that ticket because this app install failure could be related to this existing outage because of the way that sandboxes are derived from existing sites.

Andy

[Dirk Ronsmans]

I feel like a sandbox is more suited for short term testing of new features or just playing with some configuration.

I do believe the advice from Atlassian is to indeed just start a Trial of the apps and destroy/recreate the sandbox every time. The annoying part there is that app configuration is also not copied to your sandbox.

If this is really a dedicated test/development environment with several apps I would go for a small instance that you set up with a smaller audience just for testing/dev.

I'll see If I can loop in someone from Atlassian to see if there are some long term solutions on the roadmap. 

I do see the reluctance of app vendors to give out long term trials to avoid having shadow instances everywhere so I'm not sure how this could be implemented easily in the future. A token based approach could be a solution (linking it to your production instance and only one)

The sandbox system is something fairly new and still being actively developed/enhanced so i'm hopefull :)