What Is Salesforce Platform?
“Salesforce Platform is a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) product previously known as Force.com designed to simplify the development and deployment of cloud-based applications and websites.” Developers can create new custom apps & websites through the cloud IDE & deploy them quickly to Salesforce platform multi-tenant servers.
It is used to create and deploy next-generation cloud apps. As a PaaS, there are no servers or software to buy or manage, so, admins and developers can focus solely on building apps that include built-in social and mobile functionality, business processes, reporting, and search. Apps run on a secure, proven service that scales, tunes and backs up data automatically.
What Are Environments In Salesforce?
An environment is an instance of the Salesforce platform which can also be called an organization (org). It lets users access, create or deploy applications with various feature sets, depending on the configuration(like edition, license, profiles, etc) of the environment.
A good way to think about an instance of the Salesforce platform is to think about Gmail: when users sign up for Gmail, they get access to their private email account in the cloud through their browser. Similarly, when users sign up for a Salesforce platform org, they get a unique id and private access(through their own username and password) to their Salesforce platform cloud computing environment.
Characteristics Of An Environment
- Contains data (records) and customizations.
- Each environment is based on an edition, which contains specific functionality and limits.
- All environments can be accessed through any Web browser.
Types Of Environments In Salesforce
There are three types of environments:
- Production Environment
- Development Environment
- Testing Environment