helm against, or nothing at all - the free playground gives you a cluster.
1. Get a cluster
- No cluster: use the playground
- Connect your own cluster
The playground is a real, writable Kubernetes cluster that Ankra runs for you. It is ready in about two minutes and needs no cloud account.The free playground expires after the organisation has been away for 3 hours (a week on a paid plan), with a warning first. Everything you do here works the same on your own cluster.
1
Start it
On your first visit, the dashboard offers See a demo app first - click Start the playground. You land on the new cluster’s overview and can watch it provision.
2
Check it is ready
When it is ready, the overview shows Your app is live with the public URL of a small starter app Ankra deployed for you. Open it.
2. Deploy your first Stack
A Stack is what a cluster should run: Helm charts (called add-ons) and your own Kubernetes YAML (manifests), deployed together in the right order. You will deploy Grafana, the dashboarding tool, so there is something real to look at.1
Open the Stack Builder
Open your cluster, go to Stacks, and click + Create. The builder canvas opens.
2
Add the add-on
Click Add Add-on, search for Grafana, and select it. The defaults are fine - click the add-on on the canvas if you want to see or change its Helm values.
3
Deploy it
Name the Stack (for example
dashboards) and click Create Stack. This saves and deploys it in one step, straight through the agent - no Git repository needed.4
Check it is running
The Stack’s status moves to deployed within a minute or two. Go to Kubernetes → Workloads → Pods and you will see the
grafana pod Running.You can build the same Stack by asking the AI instead: press ⌘ + J (Ctrl + J on Windows and Linux) and type “Add a Stack with Grafana to this cluster”. The AI picks the chart, builds the Stack and deploys it for you.
3. Ask the AI about it
Ankra’s AI sees what you are looking at - the pod’s logs, events, manifest and recent deploys - so you can ask plain questions without pasting anything.1
Open the assistant on the pod
Open the
grafana pod from step 2 and press ⌘ + J. Leave the mode on Ask, which reads and explains but does not change anything already running.2
Ask a question
Try “Is this pod healthy, and how do I open Grafana and log in?” or “What would happen if this pod restarted?”. The answer is based on your cluster’s actual state.
4. Optional: keep the cluster’s configuration in Git
Stacks work without Git. Connect a GitHub repository when you want every change to be reviewed, versioned and reversible - Ankra then commits each Stack change to the repository, and commits you push are deployed back to the cluster.1
Connect a repository
Open the cluster, go to Settings → GitOps, choose a GitHub credential (or add one), and pick the repository. Nothing extra is installed on the cluster.
2
Check the commit
Your
dashboards Stack appears in the repository under clusters/, as Helm values and manifests you can review like any other code.You are done
You now have:- a cluster connected to Ankra, showing Healthy
- a Stack deployed to it, with its pod Running
- an answer from the AI based on your cluster’s real state
What’s next
Ship your own app
Get a repository running on a cluster and redeployed on every merge.
Build a monitoring stack
Prometheus, Grafana and Loki as one Stack.
Use the CLI and your AI assistant
ankra chat, ankra cluster apply, and the MCP server for Claude and Cursor.Reuse a Stack everywhere
Turn a working Stack into a template for every cluster.
Variables
One Stack, different values per cluster or environment.
Get alerted
Page your team in Slack when something in the cluster goes wrong.