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Experimental Environments

Experimental Environments creates SSO-protected, shareable links for prototypes, experiments, and ideas. These links can be made in minutes and shared with anyone at Autodesk.

  • A real, shareable link: anyone with an Autodesk account can open and use it.
  • No infrastructure to set up: the platform handles all of the resource provisioning for you.
  • Sign-in built in: every link sits behind Autodesk SSO automatically, so viewers just need an Autodesk account.
  • Temporary by default: every environment carries an archival date, so nothing you spin up lingers on shared hosting forever. Renew it any time, even after it’s archived.
  • Room to iterate: your quota is generous by default, and creating a new environment never touches the others.

Creating and publishing an experiment moves through three stages:

  • Create an environment: you name it, and the platform sets up a web address, an owner, an archival date, and a GitHub repository to hold your content.
  • Register a component: behind the scenes, a component is created that gets published inside the environment. Today, that’s always a static site.
  • Publish it: push your content to the repository, and a pipeline builds it and deploys it to the environment’s web address.

See Managing experiments for how to archive, extend, and check the status of your experiments.

Design and product prototypes: put a working mockup in front of stakeholders instead of describing it.

Spikes and proofs of concept: stand up a throwaway environment, publish to it, and let it archive on its own once you’re done.

Sharing work in progress: anyone at Autodesk with the link can view it once they’re signed in, so a designer, PM, or engineer can react early, before the work is finished.

Short-lived demos: environments tear themselves down on schedule, freeing their slot for the next thing.

If something isn’t working, start with adsk-experiment doctor.

For additional help, join #experimental-environments on Slack.