Hosted Sandboxes
A Hosted Sandbox is your personal slice of production-grade Kubernetes infrastructure - fully managed and running in under 2 minutes. Everything's centralized in a single pane of glass: infrastructure, configuration, monitoring, and TLS certificates. No hunting through repos or clusters for settings.
What is a Hosted Sandbox?
When you create a Codiac account and choose "Hosted Sandbox," the setup wizard automatically provisions:
- An enterprise - your organizational container
- An environment - a grouping for your cabinets
- A cluster agent - a per-tenant monitoring agent on the shared sandbox cluster
- A cabinet - your isolated runtime space (
demo-cabinet) - Six dev tools - production-ready services deployed, configured, and running
- Configurations - environment variables, ingress routes, and monitoring wired up
The entire process is automated. You watch a progress bar while Codiac builds your environment on real Kubernetes infrastructure.
Why Use a Sandbox?
Sandboxes are a great way to experience Codiac's capabilities - see how the platform manages real services, handles configuration, and organizes infrastructure. But they're also real infrastructure you can use for your needs right away:
- Learn how Codiac works - see the platform in action with real services, not documentation
- Run AI agents - give your agents a hosted environment with persistent services, reachable from anywhere
- Extend your development environment - run processes and services that need to be accessible off your local machine
- Prototype before production - test patterns and configurations before committing to infrastructure costs
Your sandbox runs on production-grade Kubernetes with enough resources to do meaningful work. Every service has a public HTTPS URL, so you can integrate with external tools, webhooks, and workflows.
Available Stacks
When you create a sandbox, you choose which stack to deploy. Each stack is tailored for a different use case:
Essentials Stack (Default)
A production-representative stack with databases, monitoring, and a sample API:
| Service | Purpose | Why it's included |
|---|---|---|
| codiac-example | Sample web API | See a real application running on Codiac |
| PostgreSQL | Relational database | Production-grade database backing the API |
| pgAdmin | Database management UI | Manage your database visually |
| Grafana | Monitoring dashboards | Real-time metrics and visualization |
| Prometheus | Metrics collection | Automatic metrics gathering from all services |
| Redis | In-memory data store | Caching and session management |
Best for: Evaluating Codiac, understanding the platform, running typical web workloads.
AI Stack
An environment optimized for running AI agents and LLM-powered applications:
| Service | Purpose | Why it's included |
|---|---|---|
| n8n | Workflow automation | Build and run AI agent workflows visually |
| PostgreSQL | Relational database | Persistent storage for agent state and data |
| pgAdmin | Database management UI | Inspect and manage your data |
| Qdrant | Vector database | Store and query embeddings for RAG applications |
| Redis | In-memory data store | Fast caching and message queuing |
Best for: Running AI agents, building LLM applications, experimenting with RAG pipelines, automating workflows.
Every service in every stack is accessible, monitorable, and running on real containers - not a simulation.
How It Works
Isolation
Each sandbox is a completely isolated environment. Your services, configurations, and data are separate from other users - you can't see theirs, they can't see yours.
Monitoring
Your sandbox includes a dedicated monitoring agent that streams real-time status directly to your Codiac dashboard. You see:
- Live service health (running, pending, failed)
- Replica counts
- Container restart counts
- Version information
Networking
Every service gets a unique HTTPS URL with a TLS certificate. Grafana, pgAdmin, n8n, and your APIs are all reachable from your browser or any external tool.
Moving to Your Own Infrastructure
When you're ready to run on your own cloud, migrating is straightforward:
codiac csp login- authenticate with your cloud provider (AWS or Azure)codiac cluster create- provision a cluster on your infrastructurecodiac host map- configure your custom domain- Drag and drop - move your cabinet to the new cluster in the UI, or use
codiac snapshot deploy
Everything you configured in your sandbox - services, settings, structure - deploys to your infrastructure in minutes.
What You Can Do
Use your services freely
Once your stack deploys, every service gets a unique HTTPS URL with a TLS certificate generated for your tenant. Grafana, pgAdmin, and the example API are all live and accessible from your browser. This is a core Codiac feature - automatic ingress with TLS for every service, no manual certificate management.
These services are yours to use. Connect to your PostgreSQL instance via pgAdmin, build Grafana dashboards against your Prometheus metrics, hit the example API from Postman or curl - use them however you want.
Configure and redeploy
Update environment variables, feature flags, or any configuration on your assets, then redeploy. The service restarts with the new settings - no image rebuild required. This is Codiac's config-on-deploy in action: one image, many configurations.
You have complete freedom to modify, adjust, and experiment with your sandbox configuration. Every change is tracked and reversible.
Explore the platform
Click through the Codiac dashboard, inspect assets, view pod status, and understand how Codiac organizes infrastructure (enterprises, environments, cabinets, assets).
Understand the structure
Your sandbox gives you a concrete example of how Codiac organizes infrastructure:
- Enterprise → top-level grouping
- Environment → team/stage grouping (dev, staging, prod)
- Cabinet → isolated runtime space within an environment
- Asset → a deployed service
This same structure scales from your sandbox to multi-cloud enterprise deployments.
What You Can't Do (and Why)
Sandboxes run on a shared cluster, so deploying custom assets is restricted for security reasons. You can configure and redeploy the included services freely, but you cannot add your own container images to the sandbox environment.
This is by design - the sandbox is a great way to experience Codiac's capabilities, explore the platform, and use the included dev tools. When you're ready to deploy your own workloads, bring your own cloud. On your own clusters, you have full control to deploy whatever you choose.
Sandbox vs Your Own Cloud
| Feature | Sandbox | Your Own Cloud |
|---|---|---|
| Dev tools & services | Full access, configure freely | Full access |
| Custom assets | Not available (security) | Deploy anything you want |
| Infrastructure | Shared cluster | Dedicated clusters |
| Unique URLs with TLS | Yes | Yes |
| Configuration changes | Full freedom | Full freedom |
| Custom domains | Not available | Full DNS support |
| Secrets management | Pre-configured | Cloud-native (AWS SM, Azure KV) |
| Cluster control | Managed by Codiac | Full control |
| Zombie Mode | Not applicable | Full support |
| Multi-environment | Single environment | Unlimited |
Path to Production
Everything you build in your sandbox is production-portable. When you're ready to scale:
- Bring your own cloud - connect your AWS or Azure account
- Same configs, same structure - your enterprise, environments, cabinets, and asset definitions carry over
- Hand it to your SRE team - they inherit a clean, versioned, reproducible environment
- Unlock enterprise features - custom domains, secrets management, Zombie Mode, multi-environment promotion, cluster hopping
Your sandbox work isn't throwaway - it's the starting point for your production deployment.
See Sandbox to Production for the complete migration guide.
Coming Soon
Hosted Sandboxes are expanding. We're building toward turnkey hosted environments where teams can:
- Spin up hosted IDEs accessible from anywhere
- Access more developer tools without infrastructure overhead
- Deploy sandboxes on your own cloud for tighter integration with your infrastructure
- More stack options tailored for specific use cases
Sandboxes will be the starting point for everything - evaluate Codiac, run your agents, prototype your stack, hand off to production.
Get Started
- Go to codiac.io
- Click Try it free
- Choose Hosted Sandbox
- Watch your stack deploy
Two minutes. No credit card. No cloud account. No install.