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What Is the Playground?

The playground is a real, writable Kubernetes environment Ankra provisions just for you. Unlike a static demo, everything works: you deploy actual stacks through the actual pipeline, browse live resources, stream real logs, and ask the AI to build and ship things - all before connecting a cluster of your own.
Each organisation can have one playground at a time. It is provisioned on Ankra’s shared playground infrastructure, isolated per organisation, and expires automatically after a few days of inactivity (you get a heads-up notification and email a day before).
The playground replaces the old read-only sandbox. If your organisation still sees a read-only “sandbox-demo” cluster, the playground has not been enabled for it yet - everything below applies once it is.

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Key Characteristics

Fully Writable

Deploy stacks, apply manifests, delete things, break things. It is a real cluster and it is yours alone.

Nothing to Install

Ankra provisions the environment and installs the agent for you. No helm command, no kubectl, no cloud account.

Starter Stack Included

A small demo application deploys through the normal Ankra pipeline the moment your playground comes online - watch a real deploy land in the activity feed.

Ephemeral by Design

The playground expires after a few days (activity extends it). You are warned a day ahead, in-app and by email.

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Starting a Playground

1

Choose the playground

On your first visit to Ankra you are offered the choice: connect your own cluster or try the playground. You can also start one any time from Clusters → Try Playground.
2

Wait about two minutes

Provisioning a real environment takes one to three minutes. The progress screen walks through the phases: reserving, starting the cluster, connecting the agent, deploying the starter stack.
3

Take the tour

You land on the cluster overview with a short tour that opens on your starter stack deploying live, then hands you the controls: deploy something yourself with the AI (press ⌘+J).
Try asking the AI: “deploy nginx with 2 replicas” - it builds the stack and ships it through the same pipeline your production deploys would use.

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What’s Included

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What You Can Do

Everything that works on an imported cluster works here:
  • Deploy stacks - build them visually or ask the AI, and watch them come alive.
  • Browse live Kubernetes resources - real pods, deployments, services, and events.
  • Stream logs and open terminals - it is a real cluster.
  • Use the AI assistant - analyse, deploy, troubleshoot.
  • Explore the activity feed - every deploy and event, as it happens.

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Limits

  • One playground per organisation; recreate it after expiry.
  • A fixed resource budget (quota-enforced) and egress restricted to what deploys need - the playground is for trying Ankra, not for hosting workloads.
  • No GitOps or cluster-access (kubeconfig) wiring - those are for clusters you own.

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Playground vs. Your Own Cluster

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Ready for the Real Thing?

Everything you did in the playground works identically on your own cluster - connecting one takes a single helm command.

Import a Cluster

Follow the step-by-step guide to connect your real Kubernetes cluster.

Install the Agent

Learn how to install and configure the Ankra Agent.
Still have questions? Join our Slack community and we’ll help out.