What is an Environment?

What is an Environment?

In Force.com terminology, environments and organizations are synonyms. In other words, an instance of the Force.com platform is an environment and is also called an organization, which is frequently shortened to org.
 Here are some important characteristics of an environment:

• Can be used for development, testing and/or production
• Contains data (records) and customizations (Custom Database Objects & Fields, Apex Code, Visualforce, Workflow, etc.)
• Each environment is based on an edition, which contains specific functionality, objects, storage and limits.
• By default, environments are not provisioned with certain advanced features (such as multi-currency or developer preview technology). You can request enablement of advanced functionality by contacting salesforce.com Customer Support.
• All environments can be accessed through a Web browser, but some can also be accessed from the Force.com IDE, SOAP API, and the Metadata API.

So an environment is an instance of the Force.com infrastructure and platform that lets you access, deploy or create applications with various feature sets, depending on the configuration of the environment.

Types of Environments

Broadly speaking, there are Two types of environments:

• Production Environments - It is a force.com Environment used to store live data. Available for sales cloud, service cloud, marketing cloud or force .com custom application.
• Sandbox Environments - t is a copy of Production data(Metadata + records) which is used to perform development and testing.Sandbox is available only on enterprise edition and unlimited edition.