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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Yes, plus:

* Near-instant creation

* Automatic spin-down scale-to-zero, so you're not paying for it when it's not in use.

If you're using these like we are internally, you've got like 2 dozen of them sitting around in the background sleeping. They're BIC disposable computers. "When in doubt just make another one."

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That's roughly what Cloudflare containers are right? (with migrations being the checkpoints?). Cloudflare containers are also nearly instant and have scale-to-zero pricing. The only difference here is the CLI?

Your pricing looks competitive on compute but roughly 4-5 times more expensive on memory and double on storage.

I see.

Also "containers" always had the option to attach durable storage via bind mounts.

I still get confused by the "this isn't containers" but it's kind of similar.

Maybe I am just too caught up in semantics.

A VPS that is instant to boot, super simple automatic routing and https proxy, with snapshot and durable is a win regardless.

"Containers" are that, and fast, in part because they share kernels, so there's no serious rebooting happening. But the consequence of that design is you share a kernel with untrusted cotenants.

And then there's just the idea of being able to pull these out of the sky literally whenever you want one. If you want to try something new out real quick, it makes no sense to figure out which of your existing Sprites to use. Just make a new one. If you're a little OCD, like I am, every once in awhile you can go prune, if you really care.

The post says "hardware isolated" but below in the sandbox it says firecracker, which I thought were supposed to be a secure way to run containers from multiple tenants on a single host. Also I thought Fly machines were already using firecracker.

I'm having trouble understanding the difference to Fly machines. If you spin up a Debian container on a machine with a persistent volume, doesn't that have everything this does? Is this about providing a layer of useful configuration/management software on top?

Subtle to explain. I'll explain better later this week. For now though, just know: every Sprite is under the hood a KVM VM.

Will you have higher tier pricing plans in the future? I don't see a way to sleep them (if you mean other than idle), and the max plan has 10 running concurrently

something that isn’t clear to me: what’s the billing when i’m not actively using a sprite? does that go to zero as well, or am i still being billed for storage?

If it's similar to cloudflare, then it should be usage based. That is you only pay for what is active. (ie: if you are running a task that is waiting on network for 1 hour, you don't pay for cpu but your app is loaded and you are paying for memory). So if your app is dormant (not using cpu or memory), you only pay for the storage you are using.

yeah reading further into the docs it looks like that’s the model. storage is pretty cheap, $.00068/gb-hr, so a 100GB disk runs you about 1.6 cents per day.

Note you're paying for what you use, not the capacity currently allocated to your Sprite.

1.6 *dollars

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