So that we may educate as well as horrify: the internals of our new Sprites execution platform.

Fly.io offers insights into edge computing, serverless architecture, and global content delivery network (CDN), providing documentation, tutorials, and best practices for deploying and scaling applications at the network edge. By exploring Fly.io's curated content, developers can learn about Fly's edge computing platform, distributed application runtime, and HTTP/2 load balancing for building fast, secure, and scalable web applications. Whether you're optimizing latency for global users, offloading compute-intensive tasks, or deploying microservices, Fly.io offers resources to supercharge your application performance and reliability.

Fly.io

Fly.io's new Sprites platform provides instant-creation Linux VMs with 100GB persistent storage that auto-sleep when idle. The architecture abandons container images for faster provisioning, uses S3-compatible object storage instead of attached NVMe for durability and mobility, and runs orchestration inside the VM rather than on the host. Sprites create in 1-2 seconds by pre-pooling standard containers, checkpoint/restore quickly via metadata operations, and integrate with Fly.io's existing Corrosion service discovery. The design trades some performance for dramatically simplified operations and enables disposable, ephemeral computing workflows.

The Design & Implementation of Sprites