The Developer Sandbox Challenge
SailPoint provides sandbox tenants for customers, partners, and developer ambassadors to learn and test configurations. However, once developers gain access to these environments, they face practical challenges: where to install virtual appliances, how to configure non-SaaS sources, and how to manage test data without affecting production systems. The typical approach of loading flat files and requesting demo data is limited when developers need to work with custom sources and realistic test scenarios. This session addresses these challenges by demonstrating how to automate the entire sandbox infrastructure using open-source tools, eliminating repetitive manual configuration tasks and resource constraints on local development machines.
Building Infrastructure with Proxmox and Ansible
Proxmox Virtual Environment serves as the foundation for this automation approach, providing a free, open-source platform for managing virtual machines and Linux containers. It runs on commodity hardware and supports both Windows and Linux VMs, making it accessible for home labs or enterprise environments. Ansible complements Proxmox as the configuration-as-code engine, enabling developers to script all setup steps for databases, application servers, and SailPoint components. Together, these tools transform a collection of spare hardware into a fully automated data center where VMs can be cloned from templates, configured consistently, and integrated with IdentityNow through API calls—all from a single command.
Practical Implementation and API Integration
The demonstration showcases creating MySQL and LDAP virtual machines from cloud-init templates using Ansible playbooks, with the entire process—from VM creation to source configuration—automated through YAML scripts. Beyond infrastructure provisioning, Ansible's URI module enables direct integration with the IdentityNow API, allowing developers to programmatically retrieve access tokens, query sources, and even create new source configurations automatically after database setup. This approach eliminates manual steps between infrastructure creation and IdentityNow configuration, enabling developers to stand up complete test environments with realistic data sources in minutes rather than hours. The reusable roles and playbooks can be customized for different scenarios and shared across teams, standardizing sandbox environments while reducing configuration errors.
