Design and Implementation of Sprites

Ball-point pens scattered strategically throughout a house ensure you'll always find one when needed, and that's exactly how Fly.io thinks about their new computing platform called Sprites. These Linux virtual machines spin up in just seconds with 100GB of storage, automatically sleep when idle, and cost almost nothing while dormant — creating what the company calls "ball-point disposable computers." Unlike traditional cloud services that rely on slow container images, Sprites eliminated user-facing containers entirely, storing everything on trustworthy S3-compatible object storage instead of risky attached drives that anchor workloads to specific servers. The platform flips conventional orchestration inside-out, running most management code within the virtual machines themselves rather than on host systems. As one developer explained, "I haven't fully put my finger on why it feels so much easier to kick off projects now that I can snap my finger and get a whole new computer." With pre-installed AI assistants like Claude running in permissionless mode, Sprites aim to make computing resources as ubiquitous and disposable as those scattered household pens.