We’re Fly.io, a public cloud platform that is both our favorite way to put an app on the Internet and our favorite way to safely let a frontier agent coding harness cook. This is a post about our company, the future, and Sprites, which are computers for agents that you can check … | Continue reading
Building agents is fun. Rebuilding agents that break themselves… less so. A lot of Fly people are building agents with less of a penchant for self-destruction by teaching their agents to do anything risky in a Sprite. You get an agent that stays alive long enough to actually use … | Continue reading
Sprites are disposable cloud computers. They appear instantly, always include durable filesystems, and cost practically nothing when idle. They’re the best and safest place on the Internet to run agents and we want you to create dozens of them. Sprites are a place to run agents; … | Continue reading
I’m Ben Johnson, and I work on Litestream at Fly.io. Litestream is the missing backup/restore system for SQLite. It’s free, open-source software that should run anywhere, and you can read more about it here. Each time we write about it, we get a little bit better at golfing down … | Continue reading
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 w … | Continue reading
The state of the art in agent isolation is a read-only sandbox. At Fly.io, we’ve been selling that story for years, and we’re calling it: ephemeral sandboxes are obsolete. Stop killing your sandboxes every time you use them. My argument won’t make sense without showing you somet … | Continue reading
I’m Ben Johnson, and I work on Litestream at Fly.io. Litestream is the missing backup/restore system for SQLite. It’s free, open-source software that should run anywhere, and you can read more about it here. Again with the sandwiches: assume we’ve got a SQLite database of sandwi … | Continue reading
Some concepts are easy to grasp in the abstract. Boiling water: apply heat and wait. Others you really need to try. You only think you understand how a bicycle works, until you learn to ride one. There are big ideas in computing that are easy to get your head around. The AWS S3 … | Continue reading
Fly.io transmogrifies Docker containers into Fly Machines: micro-VMs running on our own hardware all over the world. The hardest part of running this platform isn’t managing the servers, and it isn’t operating the network; it’s gluing those two things together. Several times a s … | Continue reading
The $FLY Airdrop is live! Claim your share of the token powering Fly.io’s global network of 3M+ apps and (🤮) own a piece of the sky! We know. Our Twitter got owned. We knew within moments of it happening. We know exactly how it happened. Nothing was at risk other than o … | Continue reading
I’m Ben Johnson, and I work on Litestream at Fly.io. Litestream makes it easy to build SQLite-backed full-stack applications with resilience to server failure. It’s open source, runs anywhere, and it’s easy to get started. Litestream is the missing backup/restore system for SQL … | Continue reading
I’m an audiophile, which is a nice way to describe someone who spends their children’s college fund on equipment that yields no observable improvement in sound quality. As such, I refused to use wireless headphones for the longest time. The fun thing about wired headphones is whe … | Continue reading
Trust calibration is a concept from the world of human-machine interaction design, one that is super relevant to AI software builders. Trust calibration is the practice of aligning the level of trust that users have in our products with its actual capabilities. If we build things … | Continue reading
Recently, I suggested that The Future Isn’t Model Agnostic, that it’s better to pick one model that works for your project and build around it, rather than engineering for model flexibility. If you buy that, you also have to acknowledge how important comprehensive model evaluatio … | Continue reading
Your users don’t care that your AI project is model agnostic. In my last project, I spent countless hours ensuring that the LLMs running my services could be swapped out as easily as possible. I couldn’t touch a device with an internet connection without hearing about the latest … | Continue reading
I’m Chris McCord, the creator of Elixir’s Phoenix framework. For the past several months, I’ve been working on a skunkworks project at Fly.io, and it’s time to show it off. I wanted LLM agents to work just as well with Elixir as they do with Python and JavaScript. Last December, … | Continue reading
With Fly.io, you can get your app running globally in a matter of minutes, and with MCP servers you can integrate with Claude, VSCode, Cursor and many more AI clients. Try it out for yourself! The introduction to Model Context Protocol starts out with: MCP is an open protocol tha … | Continue reading
Thomas Ptacek: LLMs can write a large fraction of all the tedious code you’ll ever need to write. And most code on most projects is tedious. LLMs drastically reduce the number of things you’ll ever need to Google. They look things up themselves. Most importantly, they don’t get t … | Continue reading
A heartfelt provocation about AI-assisted programming. Tech execs are mandating LLM adoption. That’s bad strategy. But I get where they’re coming from. Some of the smartest people I know share a bone-deep belief that AI is a fad — the next iteration of NFT mania. I’ve been reluct … | Continue reading
Agile Web Development with Rails 8 is off to production, where they do things like editing, indexing, pagination, and printing. In researching the chapter on Deployment and Production, I became very dissatisfied with the content available on Kamal. I ended up writing my own, and … | Continue reading
We’re Fly.io, a public cloud that runs apps in a bunch of locations all over the world. This is a post about a gnarly bug in our Anycast router, the largest Rust project in our codebase. You won’t need much of any Rust to follow it. The basic idea is simple: customers give us Doc … | Continue reading
Litestream is an open-source tool that makes it possible to run many kinds of full-stack applications on top of SQLite by making them reliably recoverable from object storage. This is a post about the biggest change we’ve made to it since I launched it. Nearly a decade ago, I got … | Continue reading
This is a blog post. Part showing off. Part opinion. Plan accordingly. The Model Context Protocol is days away from turning six months old. You read that right, six months old. MCP Servers have both taken the world by storm, and still trying to figure out what they want to be whe … | Continue reading
Today’s state of the art is K8S, Terraform, web based UIs, and CLIs. Those days are numbered. On Monday, I created my first fly volume using an MCP. For those who don’t know what MCPs are, they are how you attach tools to LLMs like Claude or Cursor. I added support for fly volume … | Continue reading
I wrote this post on our internal message board, and then someone asked, “why is this an internal post and not on our blog”, so now it is. well, Cursor built I built the most basic MCP server for flyctl I could think of. It took 30 minutes. MCP, for those unaware, is the emerging … | Continue reading
We’re Fly.io, a developer-focused public cloud. We turn Docker containers into hardware-isolated virtual machines running on our own metal around the world. We spent years coming up with a developer experience we were proud of. But now the robots are taking over, and they don’t c … | Continue reading
We’re Fly.io, a security bearer token company with a public cloud problem. You can read more about what our platform does (Docker container goes in, virtual machine in Singapore comes out), but this is just an engineering deep-dive into how we make our security tokens work. It’s … | Continue reading
Here’s a fun bug. The basic idea of our service is that we run containers for our users, as hardware-isolated virtual machines (Fly Machines), on hardware we own around the world. What makes that interesting is that we also connect every Fly Machine to a global Anycast network. I … | Continue reading
We’re building a public cloud, on hardware we own. We raised money to do that, and to place some bets; one of them: GPU-enabling our customers. A progress report: GPUs aren’t going anywhere, but: GPUs aren’t going anywhere. A couple years back, we put a bunch of chips down on the … | Continue reading
JP Phillips is off to greener, or at least calmer, pastures. He joined us 4 years ago to build the next generation of our orchestration system, and has been one of the anchors of our engineering team. His last day is today. We wanted to know what he was thinking, and figured you … | Continue reading
A boldfaced lede like this was a sure sign you were reading a carefully choreographed EffortPost from our team at Fly.io. We’re going to do less of those. Or the same amount but more of a different kind of post. Either way: launch an app on Fly.io today! Over the last 5 years, we … | Continue reading
This whole paragraph is just one long sentence. God I love just random-ass blogging again. This bit by Geoffrey Huntley is super interesting to me and, despite calling out that LLM-driven development agents like Cursor have something like a 40% success rate at actually building a … | Continue reading
We’re interested in getting integrated into the flow VSCode uses to do remote editing over SSH, because everybody is using VSCode now, and, in particular, they’re using forks of VSCode that generate code with LLMs. ”hallucination” is what we call it when LLMs get code wrong; “eng … | Continue reading
Livebook, FLAME, and the Nx stack: three Elixir components that are easy to describe, more powerful than they look, and intricately threaded into the Elixir ecosystem. A few weeks ago, Chris McCord (👋) and Chris Grainger showed them off at ElixirConf 2024. We thought the … | Continue reading
We’re Fly.io, a new public cloud with simple, developer-friendly ergonomics. Try it out; you’ll be deployed in just minutes, and, as you’re about to read, with less financial risk. Public cloud billing is terrifying. The premise of a public cloud — what sets it apart from a hosti … | Continue reading
We’re Fly.io, a new public cloud with simple, developer-friendly ergonomics. And as of today, cheaper GPUs. Try it out; you’ll be deployed in just minutes. We just lowered the prices on NVIDIA L40s GPUs to $1.25 per hour. Why? Because our feet are cold and we burn processor cycle … | Continue reading
We’re Fly.io, a global public cloud with simple, developer-friendly ergonomics. If you’ve got a working Docker image, we’ll transmogrify it into a Fly Machine: a VM running on our hardware anywhere in the world. Try it out; you’ll be deployed in just minutes. At the heart of our … | Continue reading
It’s dangerous to go alone. Fly.io runs full-stack apps by transmuting Docker containers into Fly Machines: ultra-lightweight hardware-backed VMs. You can run all your dependencies on Fly.io, but sometimes, you’ll need to work with other clouds, and we’ve made that pretty simple. … | Continue reading
I’m Nolan, and I work on Fly Machines here at Fly.io. We’re building a new public cloud—one where you can spin up CPU and GPU workloads, around the world, in a jiffy. Try us out; you can be up and running in minutes. This is a post about LLMs being really helpful, and an extensib … | Continue reading
We’re Fly.io and we transmute containers into VMs, running them on our hardware around the world with the power of Firecracker alchemy. We do a lot of stuff with WireGuard, which has become a part of our customer API. This is a quick story about some tricks we played to make Wire … | Continue reading
Eons ago, we announced we were working on Fly Kubernetes. It drummed up enough excitement to prove we were heading in the right direction. So, we got hard to work to get from barebones “early access” to a beta release. We’ll be onboarding customers to the closed beta over the nex … | Continue reading
We’re Fly.io and we transmute containers into VMs, running them on our hardware around the world with the power of Firecracker alchemy. That’s pretty cool, but we want to talk about something someone else built, that you can use today to build applications. There are three hard t … | Continue reading
Fly.io makes it easy to spin up compute around the world, now including powerful GPUs. Unlock the power of large language models, text transcription, and image generation with our datacenter-grade muscle! GPUs are now available to everyone! We know you’ve been excited about wanti … | Continue reading
We’re Fly.io and we transmute containers into VMs, running them on our hardware around the world. We have fast booting VM’s, so why not take advantage of them? Serverless is great because is has good ergonomics - when an event is received, a “not-server” boots quickly, code is ru … | Continue reading
The Problem Let’s say you’re building a web application that has a few tasks that demand a hefty amount of memory or CPU juice. Resizing images, for example, can require a shocking amount of memory, but you might need that much memory all of the time, for handling most of your we … | Continue reading
We’re Fly.io and we transmute containers into VMs, running them on our hardware around the world. We built a new security token system, and can I tell you the good news about our lord and savior the Macaroon? 1 Let’s implement an API token together. It’s a design called “Macaroon … | Continue reading
Hello all, and welcome to another episode of How I Fly, a series where I interview developers about what they do with technology, what they find exciting, and the unexpected things they’ve learned along the way. This time I’m talking with Yoko Li, an investment partner at A16Z wh … | Continue reading
Fly.io has Enterprise-grade GPUs and servers all over the globe (or disk, depending on which side of the flat Earth debate you fall on) making it a great place to deploy your next disruptive AI app. Join the GPU waitlist today! Some people daydream about normal things, like coffe … | Continue reading