Building Sandbox Infrastructure

CloudShell Colony is an Environment as a Service SaaS platform. It connects to your public cloud accounts (e.g. AWS, Azure, Kubernetes) and automates environment provisioning and deployment throughout your release pipeline. In practice, it enables users to focus on business goals rather than the cloud provider itself. Colony is based on blueprints that describe your environments based on building blocks called applications, as well as their related infrastructure components. 

We follow AWS and Azure best practices so your DevOps teams can efficiently create and replicate sandboxes that spin up and teardown according to your chosen schedule.

When the sandbox is spinning up, behind the scenes we create a VPC, application load balancer, application instances and target groups. We open different ports, create the routing table, internet gateway, hosting zone, etc. via your cloud provider resources according to best-practice. We take on the responsibility and provide this service, which is unique to Colony.

If you have different infrastructure requirements, it's not a problem. Colony integrates with Terraform as a trusted Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tool and you can make any necessary changes. 

If you’d like to see your infrastructure being built as your sandboxes spin up, follow the steps below. Every Colony application environment has a unique identifier. You search the AWS Cloud formation Stack Service according to the generated unique identifier to view all infrastructure created for that specific environment.

To see your real-time infrastructure build in AWS:

1. In the Colony UI select a Blueprint. If needed, review this article.
2. Enter the Sandbox Name, Duration, and Parameters.
3. Select Launch Sandbox and then Open Sandbox. On the top right menu, note which AWS or Azure region the sandbox is being created in.
4. Open another browser tab, login to your AWS account and navigate to your AWS Management Console, Cloud Formation Services.
5. From the right hand drop-down list, select your noted region from step 3.
6. The Cloud Formation Service shows the active state of each infrastructure stack being created for your Colony sandbox. Select a stack from the list and note its unique identifier ID in the URL.
7. Select the Resources tab to see the infrastructure being built.
8. Select the Template tab to see the Infrastructure as Code.