How Figma manages sandboxes at scale
Figma's AI products needed secure places to run untrusted code, so the team built Nimbus, a centralized sandbox platform that product teams call through a simple namespace config and GetOrCreate/Get/Delete APIs. Nimbus picks a cloud provider, applies networking and security policies (trusted-host allowlists plus read-only GET/HEAD/OPTIONS to the rest of the internet, credentials decrypted only on the way out to their intended destination), and runs sandboxd inside each box for process supervision and metrics. Warm pools of already-running sandboxes cut provisioning latency by about 90% versus cold starts, raised availability from 99% to 99.95%, and absorb minutes of provider outages while Postgres claim transactions and a Redis health-check queue keep the pool correctly sized and singly assigned.
- Published
- 2026-11-04
- Scale
- tens of thousands of sandboxes across products, warm pools cut provisioning latency ~90%, provisioning availability 99% to 99.95%, target: provisioned sandbox in under 1 second
- Techniques
- warm pools multi-provider failover network policy isolation control plane
- Stack
- Nimbus Postgres Redis multi-cloud
Try this stack yourself
- Railway · Deploy something like this on Railway: spin up Redis plus your app in a few clicks. New accounts get $20 in credit (applied when you pick a paid plan).
Railway isn't part of Figma's setup in this story. It's just an easy place to try the same building blocks.
Some links above are affiliate links: if you sign up, How They Scaled may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. We only list tools that fit the stack in the story.