What Is the Playground?
The playground is a real, writable Kubernetes environment Ankra provisions just for you - a virtual cluster with its own API server, running on Ankra’s infrastructure. 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.Playgrounds are provisioned on Ankra’s shared playground infrastructure and isolated per organisation. The free Trial is limited to one per organisation and expires once everyone has been away for a while — 3 hours on the free plan, a week on a paid one — with a heads-up notification and email first, and signing back in resets the clock. Paid sizes can be many and do not idle-expire: each stays until you destroy it, bounded by your organisation’s playground memory budget (below).
The playground replaces the old sandbox demo and is available to every organisation - there is nothing to enable. Organisations created before the change may still have a “sandbox-demo” cluster listed; it keeps working, but its deploys are simulated rather than run on real infrastructure. Start a playground for the real thing.
Watch a real playground spin up, start to finish: ready in 82 seconds, the starter app live on its own hostname, then a stack deployed onto it.
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.
Free to Try, Yours When Paid
The free Trial expires once the organisation has been away for a while - 3 hours on the free plan, a week on a paid one - with an in-app and email warning first. A paid size stays until you destroy it.
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 → Create cluster, where Playground is the first Ankra Managed option - it opens a size picker, with the free Trial preselected.
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).ankra cluster playground create), the API, and Ankra AI itself - in chat or through the MCP tools you can ask for the available sizes (with live availability and your budget headroom), order a playground, follow its provisioning, resize it, or destroy it. Anything that costs money asks for your confirmation first, naming the size and the monthly price, and every billing check applies exactly as it does in the picker.
What’s Included
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.
- Publish with an Ingress - anything you expose gets a hostname under your playground’s own domain, with TLS handled for you. Use an Ingress rather than a LoadBalancer Service: the playground host runs no load-balancer implementation, so a LoadBalancer’s external IP stays pending forever.
- Use the AI assistant - analyse, deploy, troubleshoot.
- Explore the activity feed - every deploy and event, as it happens.
Sizes and Pricing
Playgrounds are the cheapest compute power on the internet. The playground comes in sizes, ordered from the size picker in Create cluster → Playground, each at a flat monthly price with storage bundled. The vCPU and memory a size advertises are yours to deploy into: the platform components that run the environment (the virtual cluster’s control plane, CoreDNS, the Ankra agent) are reserved on top of the size, not carved out of it.
Prices are in EUR excluding VAT. That works out to €2.61 per vCPU and €1.30 per GB of RAM a month on Small, €2.02 and €1.01 on Medium, €1.90 and €0.95 on Large, and €1.75 and €0.88 on Extra large. There are no per-vCPU, per-GB, egress, IP or GPU charges on top, and a playground never counts toward your plan’s worker-vCPU metering.
Ordering a paid size requires billing permissions in your organisation, a billing plan, and a payment card on file - the billing pieces are set up on the billing page, and the picker says so before the order if anything is missing. The free Trial needs none of that. The price you order at is the price of record: later catalogue changes apply to new orders only, never to an environment you are already running. Billing runs pro-rata by the second from the moment the environment is ready until you destroy it, appears as its own line on the invoice, and every order, resize and destroy leaves a notification receipt. Unpaid invoices eventually pause the lane: new paid orders refuse while an invoice is overdue, and paid playgrounds of an organisation three weeks past due are reclaimed (with warnings well before). The full billing rules are on the billing page.
Resizing
A paid playground resizes in place from Settings → General → Playground size or from the CLI: only the namespace quota and the monthly price change, billed pro-rata across the change - the old price until the resize, the new price after. Nothing you deployed is touched. The free Trial has one fixed shape; ordering a paid size is the upgrade path.Memory budget and limit increases
Paid playgrounds share a per-organisation memory budget: the sum of their advertised memory, 8 GB by default unless a limit increase has been approved (the free Trial does not count). The size picker shows how much of the budget your playgrounds use, and a size that does not fit offers a limit-increase request right there - the new limit and a short justification, reviewed by the Ankra team, with a notification when it is decided. The budget also lives on the billing page: the Playground memory budget card shows the same numbers and request path, along with a request that is pending review or one that was declined. The free monthly AI allowance works the same way: the allowance card on the billing page offers Request a limit increase when you need more platform-funded AI usage than the plan includes. A size the shared pool cannot place right now shows as unavailable in the picker rather than disappearing - pick a smaller size or try again shortly.Limits
- One free Trial per organisation (recreate it after it expires); paid playgrounds are bounded by the organisation’s memory budget.
- 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.
Playground vs. Your Own Cluster
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.