Portal
Create a sandbox group, boot your first sandbox, and open an interactive shell — all from the ACA Sandboxes portal.
One-time setup
Go to sandboxes.azure.com and sign in with your Azure account. The portal opens directly to the Sandboxes experience — you do not need to search for the service.
A sandbox group is the regional Azure resource that holds your sandboxes. You can have one or more per subscription, resource group, and region. Create one and reuse it for everything that follows.
- Select Create in the top toolbar.
- Pick a subscription and resource group (create a new one if you don't have one).
- Give the group a name and a region (for example,
westus3). - Select Create, review your configuration in the Review drawer, then select Create to confirm.
Provisioning takes about a second. When it's done, the portal drops you on the group's overview page.
Create and run a sandbox
From the group's overview:
- Click + Create sandbox.
- Pick a disk image — start with Ubuntu if you're just trying things out.
- Leave CPU and memory at the defaults (1 vCPU, 2 GiB).
- Click Create.
Cold boot is ~2 seconds. The sandbox appears in the Sandboxes list with status Running.
Click the sandbox name to open it. A terminal opens in the browser, attached to the running sandbox. Try:
whoami
uname -a
cat /etc/os-release
You're inside a fresh, fully isolated Ubuntu environment with internet egress.
Teardown (optional)
Two options:
- Suspend the sandbox — keeps the disk, stops billing for compute. Resume in ~2 seconds.
- Delete the sandbox — frees the disk too.
Both are one-click from the sandbox's toolbar.
Next steps
- Install agent skills — let your coding agent drive sandboxes for you.
- Python quickstart — do the same thing from a script.
- CLI quickstart — do the same thing from a terminal.