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AWS Solutions Library

Innovation Sandbox on AWS

Accelerate your cloud innovation with secure, cost effective, and recyclable temporary sandbox environments

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Overview

Innovation Sandbox on AWS enables cloud administrators to automate the management of temporary sandbox environments by implementing service control policies, spend controls, and account recycling mechanisms. Using this solution, customers can save weeks of administration hours and empower their teams to learn, experiment, and innovate on AWS.

Benefits

Quickly set up your short-lived sandbox environments by automating the deployment of a sandbox organizational unit (OU) structure with nested OUs that guide the sandbox account lifecycle and adhere to workload isolation best practices.

Reduce administrative overhead by implementing standardized service control policies (SCPs) across sandbox accounts automatically, ensuring consistent governance while saving weeks of valuable cloud administration time.

Get better visibility into spend in sandbox accounts and configure automated spend limiting mechanisms that get initiated when usage approaches budget thresholds.

Leverage an intelligent resource clean-up mechanism that is automatically initiated when the spend or time period reaches predefined limits, enabling sandbox accounts to be reusable for new experiments, in accordance with AWS Organizations best practices.

Centrally monitor all sandbox accounts through a web-based UI that offers an easy mechanism for sandbox users to request account leases and be assigned a customer-owned AWS account for sandbox.

How it works

Deploying this solution with the default parameters builds the following environment in your AWS account. The high-level process flow for the solution components deployed with the AWS CloudFormation templates is as follows:

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About this deployment

  • Version: 1.0.4
  • Released: 9/2025
  • Author: AWS
  • Est. deployment time: 60 mins
  • Estimated cost: See details

Deploy with confidence

Everything you need to launch this AWS Solution in your account is right here

We'll walk you through it

Get started fast. Read the implementation guide for deployment steps, architecture details, cost information, and customization options.

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Let's make it happen

Ready to deploy? Open the CloudFormation template in the AWS Console to begin setting up the infrastructure you need. You'll be prompted to access your AWS account if you haven't yet logged in. 

Launch in the AWS Console

Customers

University of Sheffield

“We built a new course module to teach GenAI and get our students familiarized with Amazon Bedrock. We were able to get this rolling quite quickly with Innovation Sandbox on AWS and managed to make Amazon Bedrock available to students in a controlled way, with security and cost controls in place. The module we introduced now enables a set of law students to build their own GenAI Law agent for their Law Advice clinique. Our vision is for the GenAI Law agent to be improved each semester by new students and eventually become an innovative agentic AI product that can be used by all law students within the university - or even better, in the broader legal industry.“

Ben Orza, Former Lead Technology Architect - IT Services, University of Sheffield

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RMIT University

"Innovation Sandbox has allowed us to focus on delivering quality education rather than managing the complexities of cloud infrastructure. It's been valuable in supporting our students working on cloud security assignments. In a sandbox environment, the ability to configure different roles and permissions has helped us to support our students' learning effectively, while maintaining a secure and flexible learning environment."

Iqbal Gondal, Associate Dean Cyber Security & Software Systems, School of Computing Technologies, RMIT University

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University of East London

"Innovation Sandbox on AWS has reduced operational burden for our AWS admins by streamlining the management of sandbox environments for students and staff to experiment with. We manage 330+ sandbox accounts through this product and it has simplified our lifecycle management, which enables me to spend more time on the academic objectives - to create various environments that students need for their learning requirements."

Jordan Richards, Solutions Architect - IT Services, University of East London

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Hanoi University of Science and Technology

“The Innovation Sandbox on AWS was instrumental in enabling us to host HACK TOGETHER 2025 at scale and onboard 24 hackathon teams in just a few days. By providing secure and isolated environments, the solution empowered our hackathon teams to experiment freely, while giving us the peace of mind through built-in governance and cost controls. This solution aligned perfectly with our digital transformation strategy and helped us create a truly innovative and hands-on experience for all participants.”

Nguyen Binh Minh, Associate Professor and Dean, Institute for Digital Technology and Economy, Hanoi University of Science and Technology

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