Cloud Playground

The AISIX Cloud playground lets you test a single-target model from the Cloud UI. Use it to confirm that the model can reach its upstream provider and return a chat response before you send application traffic through the managed gateway.

Testing Models in the Playground

Playground requests run from the control plane to the upstream provider. Use them to validate the provider key, upstream base URL, model name, and basic prompt response from the Cloud UI.

The playground sends OpenAI-compatible chat-completions requests. Use it with single-target models whose provider key points to an OpenAI-compatible upstream base URL, including Anthropic-backed models exposed through an OpenAI-compatible endpoint.

Playground requests bypass the managed gateway, so they are not recorded in Cloud Logs, Usage, managed gateway metrics, or external telemetry exporter output. AISIX Cloud budgets and rate limits do not apply to playground requests. Each run still calls the upstream provider with the model's provider key, so it consumes provider quota and is billed by the provider like any other API call.

Managed gateway requests run through the runtime that applications use. Send traffic through the managed gateway to validate caller API keys, model aliases, routing rules and failover, cache behavior, guardrails, budgets, rate limits, streaming behavior, logs, usage reporting, and metrics. Use managed gateway traffic when you need to validate endpoint families beyond chat completions or provider-specific protocol behavior.

Reaching Private-Network Endpoints in Self-Hosted Deployments

The playground proxy refuses to connect to private, internal, or loopback IP addresses by default. This block prevents the control plane from being used to reach internal network services through a crafted model endpoint — a server-side request forgery (SSRF) protection. In managed AISIX Cloud every real upstream is a public provider, so the block is never in the way. In a self-hosted deployment whose models point to an LLM endpoint on an internal network, the same block stops the playground from reaching it. The request then fails with the error code UPSTREAM_PRIVATE_IP_BLOCKED.

To let the playground reach a private-network endpoint, set AISIX_PLAYGROUND_ALLOW_PRIVATE_IPS=1 on the control-plane API service and restart it:

• Offline package (Docker Compose): uncomment AISIX_PLAYGROUND_ALLOW_PRIVATE_IPS=1 in .env, then run docker compose up -d api.
• Helm chart: set api.playgroundAllowPrivateIPs=true.

Leave the default in place when your model endpoints are public. This setting affects only the playground proxy; the data plane always reaches upstream providers directly and is unaffected.

Next Steps

Continue with Usage Reporting to understand how AISIX Cloud reports managed gateway usage, spend, and budget-related signals.