Salesforce running on a public cloud architecture is, in a word, Hyperforce. The elasticity of the public cloud can be used by Salesforce to increase the pace at which Sandboxes are cloned thanks to the new infrastructure architecture, which was unveiled in December 2020. Salesforce is introducing Quick Clone, its first speedup, for Developer and Developer Pro Sandboxes in the winter of 23.

What is Quick Clone exactly?

Using the production org or an existing Sandbox as the source of the copy are the two options available to admins and developers for requesting Sandboxes. They receive a copy of the metadata, or metadata and data, from the production org when they build one of the four types of sandboxes—Developer, Developer Pro, Partial, or Full. This is helpful when creating or testing customizations using the most recent production organization state.

However, development teams sharing a Sandbox without version control may unknowingly step on each other’s toes, resulting in conflicting modifications. Teams must devote significant time and effort to meticulously tracking each developer’s modifications or risk introducing defects into production. Similarly, sandboxes reused in continuous integration systems are frequently modified by tests, making it more difficult for developers to reproduce errors. The clone functionality, which replicates an complete Sandbox, enables teams to tackle the aforementioned difficulties by creating a “template sandbox” with the appropriate metadata and sample data and stamping out clones of it for parallel work and better bug reproduction. However, the time necessary to create a clone depends on the number of clones required.

How do I activate Quick Clone?

Starting in Winter ’23, all Hyperforce Developer and Developer Pro Sandboxes are automatically activated for Quick Clone. The screenshot below shows the Sandbox page inside Setup, which displays a list of all Sandboxes associated with the production org. The Location column tells which instances have the various Sandboxes and whether or not the instances are in Hyperforce. When you click the Clone button next to a Hyperforce-based Sandbox, the Quick Clone feature is used to quickly build the replica Sandbox.

Customers must meet Hyperforce eligibility standards and have their production orgs in Hyperforce to construct Sandboxes and access Quick Clone. Customers who have current production orgs in Salesforce’s first-party data centers must contact their Account team to arrange a Hyperforce migration. After migrating a production org to Hyperforce, all further Sandbox creations and refreshes are handled automatically in Hyperforce.

Customers can use Quick Clone in addition to the UI by cloning their Hyperforce-based Developer and Developer Pro Sandboxes via the CLI.

What’s next for Hyperforce Sandboxes?

Quick Clone will be available for the Developer and Developer Pro Sandboxes in Winter ’23. While our roadmap is open to change, Salesforce aims to follow up in Spring ’23 with the Quick Clone capability for Partial and Full Sandboxes. Salesforce intends to dramatically accelerate all Full Sandboxes for Hyperforce-based customers by Winter ’24, regardless of the source of the Sandbox. To put it another way, we’re just getting started.