Sandboxed production clones

What?

A sandboxed production clone is an isolated, near-identical copy of a live production environment, used for:

  • Safe testing of patches, updates, and security configurations

  • Malware analysis without risking real systems

  • Threat hunting using realistic traffic and logs

  • Developer testing without breaking production

Unlike traditional staging environments, these clones:

  • Mirror real data (anonymised if needed)

  • Run in strict isolation (network segmentation, no outbound internet)

  • Can be reset on-demand (snapshot-based)


How to build a sandboxed clone

Data extraction & sanitisation

Methods:

  • Database dumps (MySQL, PostgreSQL) with PII scrubbing

  • Virtual machine snapshots (VMware, Hyper-V, AWS AMIs)

  • Containerised clones (Docker/Kubernetes with volume mounts)

Sanitisation Tools:

  • Anonymisation: faker (Python), pg_anonymizer (PostgreSQL)

  • Subset sampling: jq (JSON), csvkit (CSV)

# Example: Create a sanitised MySQL dump  
mysqldump --single-transaction production_db | \  
  sed 's/real_email@domain.com/test_user@example.org/g' > sanitised_db.sql  

Environment isolation

Network Controls:

  • No internet access (iptables/nftables block outbound traffic)

  • Private VLANs (separate from production)

  • Host-based firewalls (allow only required ports)

Access Restrictions:

  • Separate credentials (no production keys/secrets)

  • Time-limited sessions (auto-expire after 4 hours)

Automated deployment

Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) Options:

Tool

Use Case

Example Command

Terraform

Cloud VM/network provisioning

terraform apply -var "env=sandbox"

Ansible

Configuration management

ansible-playbook clone_prod.yml

Vagrant

Local VM cloning

vagrant up --provider=virtualbox

Example AWS Clone Setup:

# Create a sandboxed VPC  
aws ec2 create-vpc --cidr-block 10.0.0.0/16 --tag-specifications 'ResourceType=vpc,Tags=[{Key=Name,Value=sandbox-clone}]'  

# Restrict outbound traffic  
aws ec2 create-security-group --group-name "sandbox-no-internet" --description "Block all egress" --vpc-id vpc-123  
aws ec2 revoke-security-group-egress --group-id sg-123 --ip-permissions '[{IpProtocol="-1", FromPort=-1, ToPort=-1, IpRanges=[{CidrIp="0.0.0.0/0"}]}]'  

Tooling recommendations

Category

Open-Source

Enterprise

Virtualisation

KVM, VirtualBox

VMware vSphere, Nutanix

Containers

Docker, Podman

Red Hat OpenShift

Orchestration

Terraform, Ansible

HashiCorp Stack, AWS Control Tower

Monitoring

ELK Stack, Grafana

Splunk, Datadog


Implementation checklist

  • Define data scope (full clone vs. subset)

  • Implement network isolation (VLANs/firewalls)

  • Automate deployment (IaC templates)

  • Schedule regular resets (e.g., weekly snapshots)

  • Audit access (who can spin up/down clones)

Example Reset Policy:

All sandbox clones must:  
1. Be destroyed after 7 days unless exempted  
2. Log all user activity (ssh, database queries)  
3. Block outbound internet by default  

Why this works

  • Reduces production risks from untested changes

  • Improves threat detection with realistic data

  • Cost-effective (cloud instances can be paused when unused)


Last update: 2025-06-08 13:05