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. One or more per (subscription, resource group, region). Create one and reuse it for everything that follows.
- Click + Create sandbox group 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). - Click Review + create, then Create.
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 Ubuntu environment, fully isolated, 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.