Getting started¶
In about 15 minutes you will have a sandbox running in your AWS account (most of the time goes into waiting for AWS to build the image). This section follows a linear path: each page ends where the next one begins.
What you need¶
| Requirement | Detail |
|---|---|
| An AWS account | with administrator or bootstrap permissions once, so rayito setup can deploy CloudFormation stacks (IAM and, if you have no bucket, an S3 one) |
| A region with Lambda MicroVMs | us-east-1, us-east-2, us-west-2, eu-west-1, eu-central-1, eu-north-1, ap-northeast-1, ap-south-1, ap-southeast-1 or ap-southeast-2 |
| The AWS CLI v2 (optional) | only for the manual path, without rayito setup (aws s3 mb, aws cloudformation deploy), the aws sts checks and signing in with SSO. Install it |
curl and cosign ≥ 2.x (optional) |
only on the manual path: download the IAM template and the release image, and verify its signature before publishing it (Verify a release) |
| AWS credentials on your machine | a profile (aws configure or aws configure sso), environment variables or the machine's role |
| Python ≥ 3.11 or Node ≥ 20 | the Python SDK (rayito on PyPI) or the TypeScript SDK (rayito on npm). The rayito CLI comes with either one: pip install "rayito[cli]" or npx rayito |
You do not need Docker on your machine: AWS builds the sandbox image from a zip. There is no Rayito API key and no account to create anywhere else.
The recommended path¶
- Installation: the SDK, the CLI and the optional extras.
- Set up AWS: IAM, the bucket (reused or created) and
the
rayito-baseimage in your account. You do it once per account and region. - First sandbox: commands, files, code and reconnecting from another process.
- Concepts: what runs where, the three clocks of a sandbox, the two tokens and reconnection.
Step 2 is done once per account and region (about 15 min). What every application repeats is installing the SDK (step 1) and writing its code (step 3).
When you are done, the Guides explain each feature (among them, a coding agent inside the sandbox) and the Reference lists every parameter. If what you want is to deploy your own agent, start with Your agent in 5 minutes; to take it to Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Runtime, read Deploy to AgentCore, and to declare it in your CDK app, Deploy with CDK.
Coming from E2B?
Still follow Set up AWS: the SDK needs an image in your account. After that, Migrate from E2B tells you which import to change and what behaves differently.
How much it costs to try
A 2 GB sandbox costs ≈ $0.126 per hour while it runs (us-east-1, 2026-09) and each published image version ≈ $0.04 per week of storage. Going through this whole section costs a few cents. Details and examples in Pricing.