Sandboxing

There are times when we're not quite sure if we trust a program yet or not, and maybe we want to test it out in a test environment. Or maybe another scenario: maybe we know we can't trust it, that it has some sort of virus or malware inside of it, and so what we want to do is open it up and analyze it. But how do we do that without infecting our whole computer? Well, we can do that using something called sandboxing.

A Place to Play

I remember when I was a kid, I had a sandbox in my backyard. We'd go and we'd create different things. We'd create houses, we'd create castles, we'd create this whole imaginary world. And it was a fun place to play. Well, sandboxing is kind of like that. It's a little playground that we have that's not the real thing, but it's a place that we can play and experiment around with building things like houses and castles.

When it comes to programs, a sandbox is this area that we can start playing around with things and testing it that's not production, that's not live, that's not out there.

What Sandboxing Looks Like

So what does sandboxing look like? Well, let's say we have a program that we have some concerns over, or that we want to analyze before we're deploying it, or for some reason we don't want it to be out there in the real world, but we want it to be in a controlled environment, a controlled environment that doesn't have access to a lot of other resources.

So what would I do? Well, maybe I grab a laptop or a desktop and I set it up on there that's not connected to the rest of my network. Or maybe it's a whole environment, if I'm in a software development environment, it's a whole environment that we've created that we can deploy things through and test them out. Or maybe if it's on a computer, what I can do is I can segregate this program from everything else and give it access to certain resources, but only the resources it needs to run.

So it's this controlled environment that doesn't affect the whole computer or the whole environment, but it's a separate environment that only has access to certain resources, and we call that sandboxing.

Sandboxing Before Production

Here's a little different context when it comes to sandboxing. Here we have some production servers, and what we have is code that's running on these production servers that our clients are actually connecting into, that our users are connecting into. Now imagine if we just pushed out all of our changes directly to production. Well, this could affect our end users, and that could be problematic.

So instead we set up a testing environment, or a development environment, or a staging environment, or a sandbox environment. In fact, I've seen where we have usually multiple environments before it ever gets into production, each for their specific reasons. And so we set up this sandboxing environment to help test things and develop things before it goes to production.