If your sandbox fails to launch, it’s usually related to one of the following scenarios:

• Errors that prevented your sandbox from starting (there is no sandbox in this case)
• Errors that prevented applications from starting to deploy
• Errors that occurred while applications were deploying
• No error but the sandbox is stuck on deploying state

Errors that prevented your sandbox from starting (there is no sandbox in this case)

The Experience

You start a sandbox and instantly receive an error message. In this case the sandbox is not created.

Common Causes

• CloudShell Colony could not correctly interpret your blueprint and/or applications.
• CloudShell Colony could not access your cloud account using the given role.
• CloudShell Colony tried to send your infrastructure request to your cloud account but received a critical error.

Example

A blueprint specifies the wrong region name.

Errors that prevented applications from starting to deploy

The Experience

You start a sandbox, but some of the infrastructure cannot get created, which causes an application to move to "aborted" state.

Common Causes

You are reaching the limit of the cloud provider’s quota or specifying incorrect image identifiers or incorrect machine sizes. In this case, some cloud resources may have been created. You may access the VMs and investigate further and end the sandbox manually whenever you like.

Example

By specifying a wrong AMI ID in AWS, an error displays in the sandbox summary tab, and the application aborts.

Errors that occurred while applications were deploying

The Experience

You start a sandbox, the infrastructure is created and provisioned and while the applications are deploying, some fail and report an error state.

Common Causes

The error here comes from the health check that runs in parallel to the start script of your applications. The health check reports a failure to start the application when it reaches its defined timeout. In this case, cloud resources will remain live to allow you to access the VMs and investigate further. You may end the sandbox manually and clean up the cloud resources whenever you like.

To investigate further, you need to connect to the instance and look in the deployment log files. For troubleshooting guidelines, see Troubleshooting Initialization Scripts. 

Example

A simple scenario of a failed initialization script. In the Applications tab, one of the applications is marked with an error:

In the Troubleshooting tab, selecting the application displays exactly which compute instance failed:

Connecting to the failed instance using SSH allows you to browse the ‘events’ logs, which indicate the deployment failed, as expected:

Printing the initialization script log shows the cause of the problem:

No error but the sandbox is stuck in deploying state

The Experience

You start a sandbox, the infrastructure gets created and provisioned, and then some applications continue deploying without stopping.

Common Causes

This usually happens when your initialization script does not stop. There may be an ‘infinite loop’ bug or it may mistakenly wait for user input. To verify that this is the case, you can login to the compute instance and check the events log.

Example

The deployment process is stuck on the Initialization step: