Image by Annie Ruygt
We’re Fly.io, and this is the place in the post where we’d normally tell you that our job is to take your containers and run them on our own hardware all around the world. But last week, we launched Sprites, and they don’t work that way at all. Sprites are something new: Docker without Docker without Docker. This post is about how they work.
Replacement-level homeowners buy boxes of pens and stick them in “the pen drawer”. What the elites know: you have to think adversarially about pens. “The purpose of a system is what it does”; a household’s is to uniformly distribute pens. Months from now, the drawer will be empty, no matter how many pens you stockpile. Instead, scatter pens every place you could possibly think to look for one — drawers, ledges, desks. Any time anybody needs a pen, several are at hand, in exactly the first place they look.
This is the best way I’ve found to articulate the idea of Sprites, the platform we just launched at Fly.io. Sprites are ball-point disposable computers. Whatever mark you mean to make, we’ve rigged it so you’re never more than a second or two away from having a Sprite to do it with.
Sprites are Linux virtual machines. You get root. They create in just a second or two: so fast, the experience of creating and shelling into one is identical to SSH'ing into a machine that already exists. Sprites all have a 100GB durable root filesystem. They put themselves to sleep automatically when inactive, and cost practically nothing while asleep.
As a result, I barely feel the need to name my Sprites. Sometimes I’ll just type sprite create dkjsdjk and start some task. People at Fly.io who use Sprites have dozens hanging around.
There aren’t yet many things in cloud computing that have the exact shape Sprites do:
Instant creation
No time limits
Persistent disk
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