Hot Start
Pre-heat your sandbox environments
Hot starting is creating a pool of sandbox instances that are instantly available when a learner starts your track. Without Hot Start, sandbox environments start on demand when a learner starts a track. This means learners have to wait for Instruqt to provision the sandbox environment before they can access them. But with Hot Start, environments are pre-provisioned so learners can play your tracks right away.
Hot Start billing
You are billed for hot start sandbox instances, even if learners are not using them.
There are two types of hot start pools:
- Always hot pool Always hot pools maintain a constant pool size over time and have the following features:
- The pool remains active until you delete it.
- Instruqt refills the pool if learners start tracks to maintain a constant pool size.
- Instruqt removes unused sandboxes only if the pool is deleted.
When to use an always hot pool?Create an always hot pool to maximize engagement for your learners by reducing load times. This is useful for self-paced training or lead generation as you expect learners to start tracks spread out. - Scheduled pools Scheduled pools are used to fill a pool with sandboxes once and have these features:
- A scheduled pool is active from its start date until the pool expires.
- Instruqt will not refill a scheduled pool if learners start tracks.
- Instruqt removes unused sandboxes after the pool expires.
When to use a scheduled pool?Create a scheduled pool to give your learners instant access to their sandboxes, so they do not have to wait and can all begin simultaneously. This is useful for classroom training or large workshops when you expect many learners to start a track simultaneously
Shared Hot Start is in private beta. Contact us for more information.
When creating a regular hot start pools, you can select one or more tracks to be used. This creates hot standby instances of those specific tracks. When you have a lot of tracks that have a very similar sandbox definition, you can also convert that sandbox definition to a Sandbox Preset and use that to create a Shared Hot Start pool.
Shared Hot Start pools are not configured using tracks, but using Sandbox Presets. When creating a pool for sandbox presets, all tracks that are using that preset can claim instances from the same Hot Start pool. This allows to create a more cost effective Hot Start setup, because you do not need to create pooled instances for every single track.
When publishing a new Sandbox Preset version, any hot start pools using that preset will automatically refresh all instances of that preset to use the latest version.
Last modified 19d ago