Move from the sandbox to live work

What the sandbox did and did not give you

The sandbox gave you the shape of a run. You know what a quote states, what approval means, how a job reports its state, and how to read a bundle. That is real learning, and it carries over.

It gave you no account, no credentials and no standing to run anything. Live work starts from a fresh context, on purpose.

So start there. Create or open your Compute account and confirm your member role. Then mint the work key you will submit with. A work key carries work scopes only; it can never administer finance, destinations or identities.

Nothing you did in the sandbox pre-authorizes any of this, and nothing is charged by setting it up.

Register the real input and destination

Register the source your real input lives in, and test it. Register the destination you want results written to, and test that too.

Your synthetic input has no live equivalent. A real input is snapshotted before work begins, so the run is pinned to exact bytes rather than to whatever the source holds later.

Ask for a new quote every time

Request a live quote for the real workflow and the real input. Sandbox identifiers are never reused, and a live operation will refuse them:

• A sandbox job identifier cannot be resumed, downloaded or billed live.
• A mock quote cannot be approved live. It was never signed with any authority.
• A sample receipt is not evidence about a live run and will not be accepted as one.

A live quote is signed, states a maximum charge, and carries an expiry. It authorizes nothing on its own.

Approve the work as a separate act

Read the quote, then approve it deliberately. Approval is a distinct decision, never an automatic consequence of asking for a quote.

In an organization, the approval may need someone who holds spend authority. Set that up before you need it, so your first live job is not blocked at the last step.

Treat sandbox success as partial evidence

A clean sandbox run proves you can drive the lifecycle. It does not prove your live job will be admitted.

Four things the sandbox could not test for you:

1. Whether your real input passes validation and item-identity checks.
2. Whether your real schema matches what the workflow declares.
3. Whether your account and spend authority allow this work.
4. Whether capacity is available for the deadline you set.

Each of those is checked live, at quote or at admission, and each refuses with its own reason and next action.

If the live quote or admission refuses

A refusal is not a failed run. Nothing was admitted, so nothing was charged.

Read the reason and take the stated next action. If the quote was signed and something changed before you submitted, admission returns REPLAN_REQUIRED; ask for a new quote and submit again. See how to read a quote if the maximum charge or the expiry is unclear.

Run one small job first

Pick one bounded task with an outcome you can check by hand, exactly as the sandbox set was bounded at eight rows. Compare the real result against what you expected before you scale up.

The next page walks that through: run your first small live test.