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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.

Auto-refill

With the auto-refill option hot pools maintain a constant pool size over the scheduled period.
  • 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 auto-refill?
Enable auto-refill 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.

Scheduling

Scheduled pools are used to fill a pool with sandboxes for the period of the scheduled dates.
  • If the pool does not have an end date it will be indefinitely from the start date. Unless the pool is deleted or modified.
  • A scheduled pool is active from its start date until the pool expires (the end date).
  • Instruqt removes unused sandboxes after the pool expires.
When to use scheduling?
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 over a certain period.

Shared Hot Start pools

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.