Design and Implementation of Sprites
1–10 of 111 posts
Re: Design and Implementation of Sprites
#2I wish I'd had more space to write about the global orchestrator design, because it's fun.
The Fly Machines orchestrator goes through some trouble to keep the source of truth for each VM decentralized, owned by the physical it runs on. But there's still global state --- apps, organizations, services. That stuff is all on Postgres. Postgres keeps up with it just fine but I'd be lying if I didn't say we're always looking out the corner of our eyes on metrics.
The global state for Sprites is on object storage. Each organization gets a separate SQLite database, and that database is synchronized to object storage with Litestream.io (Lightstream is load bearing in a bunch of places here; solid as a rock for us).
I think people really still sleep on the "multiple SQLite database" backing store design.
Re: Design and Implementation of Sprites
#3I've been having fun with OpenCode's webui in a Sprite, set it up right in Termux and you can vibe code a website with a full backend from your phone. I have a Termux shortcut that sets up a port forward and pops open my web browser to the OpenCode webui. OpenCode can pick up the Sprite skill built into the containers so it can manage the instance itself (mostly setting up and destroying services).
Of course you can do similar with a VPS, but this makes it very easy (and cheap!) to spin up an entire new machine with a public url and HTTPS whenever you want to.
Re: Design and Implementation of Sprites
#4I wish I'd had more space to write about the global orchestrator design, because it's fun. The Fly Machines orchestrator goes through some trouble to keep the source of truth for each VM decentralized, owned by the physical it runs on. But there's still global state --- apps, organizations, services. That stuff is all on Postgres. Postgres keeps up with it just fine but I'd be lying if I didn't say we're always looki…
For those who missed it, tptacek wrote TFA.
Re: Design and Implementation of Sprites
#5I appreciate the Fly.io team’s enthusiasm and am optimistic this will mature into a product I’d pay for, but my initial impression was of a lack of polish.
Documentation is sparse, or not even available? The API docs don’t tell you much about the service itself, and a Google search for docs returns an inaccessible website as the first result (https://docs.sprites.dev). Blog posts and forum threads and Claude skills shouldn’t be a substitute.
The snappiness of the sprites is very cool and I can definitely see it integrating into future Claude Code workflows. But the lack of a base container images means you’re still doing setup work on the sprite before you can begin development. I understand the philosophy is that sandboxes should be persistent, but Claude Code sessions also work better when isolated from each other, so it’d be nice to have some precepts to get a workspace setup quickly (given agentic coding is clearly a target).
I also found the CLI unintuitive but maybe that was just me!
So very cool idea but left with the impression that the Fly.io team’s should have spent a couple weeks on polish before shipping.
Re: Design and Implementation of Sprites
#6[flagged]
Re: Design and Implementation of Sprites
#7I appreciate the Fly.io team’s enthusiasm and am optimistic this will mature into a product I’d pay for, but my initial impression was of a lack of polish. Documentation is sparse, or not even available? The API docs don’t tell you much about the service itself, and a Google search for docs returns an inaccessible website as the first result ( https://docs.sprites.dev ). Blog posts and forum threads and Claude skills…
You're not wrong. The documentation actually had a hallucinated link to an Anthropic dependency in it when we shipped. Right now the attitude is mostly "if we have to document it extensively, we're doing something wrong". It's been in the works for awhile, with a small team, and we're just getting it out there right now.
I've been needling Kurt for several months now that if we wait until it's polished enough that we don't see comments like this, we're doing it wrong.
Re: Design and Implementation of Sprites
#8[flagged]
It's a hardware-isolated Linux shell with a durable disk you can conjure out of the sky on 1.5 seconds notice that costs virtually nothing when you're not actively using it. If we could have shipped this in 2021, before anyone thought coding agents would work, we'd have barfed on our shoes with excitement.
Re: Design and Implementation of Sprites
#9I wish I'd had more space to write about the global orchestrator design, because it's fun. The Fly Machines orchestrator goes through some trouble to keep the source of truth for each VM decentralized, owned by the physical it runs on. But there's still global state --- apps, organizations, services. That stuff is all on Postgres. Postgres keeps up with it just fine but I'd be lying if I didn't say we're always looki…
I've been working on the orchestrator side with Elixir and Phoenix, so happy to continue the discussion for curious minds. One of the coolest things we can do is things like this in Elixir - from any node we can reach out to a sqlite db across the planet:
OrgTracker.with_repo(org_id, fn ->
repo.all(from sprite in "sprites", select: ...)
That will find or place an Elixir process on the cluster and rpc the target node with our code. Placements can be sticky so they pin to a machine so we don't have to suck down the db every start, but we also balance out the load and handle failover of durable processes automatically. Combined with litestream, the result is distributed sqlite with failover while treating it essentially like a locally reachable sqlite db. Yes there is the speed of light to contend with, but by sending the execution across the wire rather than individual queries, we only ever pay a single hop to reach the process/sqlite.
Re: Design and Implementation of Sprites
#10[flagged]
It's a hardware-isolated Linux shell with a durable disk you can conjure out of the sky on 1.5 seconds notice that costs virtually nothing when you're not actively using it. If we could have shipped this in 2021, before anyone thought coding agents would work, we'd have barfed on our shoes with excitement.
[flagged]