Comment by danielvf
2 days ago
Sprites are a beautiful place to make an abstraction.
But I have never used a buggier infrastructure product in 30 years of development than when I tried sprites. Data loss left and right, sprites going into unconnectable zombie mode. Couldn't use even load snapshots because half the system seemed to think the sprite was fine, and half seemed to think it was dead. I gave up after two weeks of losing stuff over lunch or overnight or in the middle of working. I vividly remember scrolling through my terminal history, copy/pasting out work I could find to save from a dead sprite. I would guess that half or more of the sprites I launched had some kind of problem.
Hope they get things stable. The concept is great.
I operate an app that orchestrates code running on a bunch of Sprites. A few months ago it was an exceptionally buggy service, frequently just fully broken or losing data (had to get support involved to recover one that got into a fully broken state), but from what I've seen at least they've become much more reliable in the past two months or so.
I evaluated Fly.io itself several years ago and found it unacceptably buggy as well for any real use case at the time, but I kept an eye on it and today I operate a few production workloads on it that are very stable and reliable—I figured the same would be true for Sprites and it seems to be taking shape that way.
This isn't even a Sprite specific thing. Their whole platform is known for this for years and they have yet to even care to fix it.
So it might be good the CEO is quitting because he has done a horrible job.
Their pricing...also leaves much to be desired. They are almost at Big Three cloud/Vercel level of cost with none of the stability. Their anycast network however is decent.
Can second this. I had an enterprise client that was interested in using these for fast development etc. Wasn’t my project or the reason I was there but I was curious so I kept up with it.
Eventually they abandoned the company but stuck with the concept by going with another company. Complaints were the same, extremely buggy interface, dataloss, but also terrible support. That may have been there fault though for not using their actual domain for the test period (and not mentioning that they were an F200 or something).
I won't claim strong enthusiasm for Sprites, but in my experience (albeit way back in 2021) Fly's support was absolutely top-notch, up to and including Kurt personally working with me to help debug our deployments. This was as a small business only billing a few hundred a month.
> Kurt personally working with me to help debug our deployments
Typical Kurt in Founder Mode. For the first 3+ years (immediately following their "launch hn"), Kurt was almost ever present in the forums.
> claim strong enthusiasm for Sprites
Fly.io has had their own share of problems with various features they've built, but once the lego blocks fit & click, there isn't a New Cloud better at DX than it. Though, like TFA points out, the world since Opus 4 has looked very, very different.
This would have been much more recent. Maybe something changed?
Either way I wasn’t privy to the actual details, just that it was one of their gripes.
> but stuck with the concept by going with another company.
Mind giving a hint on another company name?
> (and not mentioning that they were an F200 or something).
I am not a F200 company or anything, just a normal guy but I have the opinion that I personally like the companies who treat normal accounts and the general experience/support. I have just felt like as if its a good litmus test depending on things. What are your opinion on things and was the enterprise client opening up a normal account intentionally similar to line of thinking or for other reasons?
I had some conversations with the lead on the project and his reasoning was something along the lines of “we’ve been suckered into using something with sweetheart attention before only to have the rug pulled when we’re ‘reliant’”.
I also think he might have not wanted the attention that putting the company name on the account might get.
Were those good reasons? Honestly I don’t know, but apparently the experience of using the product spoke for itself.
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