January 30, 2026
Fight night: SQLite vs Postgres
Litestream Writable VFS
SQLite on the cloud gets a write switch — hype vs panic
TLDR: Fly.io added write support to Litestream’s SQLite plugin so apps can read and write from cloud storage for near‑instant startup. The internet split: fans cheering “SQLite everywhere” versus skeptics warning about latency and consistency, sparking fresh debates over building on S3 and replacing big shared databases.
SQLite just got a new party trick: Litestream’s plugin can now write straight against cloud storage, letting Fly.io’s fast-booting “Sprites” read answers before the database even finishes downloading. Fans are calling it “SQLite with superpowers,” hyped that every app gets its own tiny database synced to S3-style storage. The “many databases” pattern has stans chanting “goodbye, mega-Postgres,” while others admire the engineering flex of booting with 100GB in under a second. The in-joke of the day: the blog’s fake-out “it’s BoltDB—kidding!” got devs posting the Spider‑Man pointing meme at SQLite.
Of course, drama: skeptics warn that writing through a virtual file system (VFS) to object storage sounds like “living dangerously.” Ops folks demand receipts on consistency and latency; performance hawks note even Fly.io admits cloud-reads aren’t fast enough for steady state. A pragmatic crowd says “great for cold starts, not a database replacement,” while purists groan, “Don’t turn S3 into a filesystem.” Meanwhile, portability die‑hards love that Litestream is open-source and runs anywhere, not just on Fly. Verdict from the comments: equal parts awe and side‑eye — a tech mic drop that reignites the eternal SQLite vs Postgres bar fight.
Key Points
- •Litestream keeps SQLite databases synchronized with S3-compatible object storage, providing backup/restore without app changes.
- •Fly.io’s Sprites use Litestream for their Elixir-based global orchestrator, assigning each organization its own SQLite database.
- •Litestream is embedded in every Sprite’s storage stack, with JuiceFS and NVMe read-through caching over S3-compatible storage.
- •A block map metadata store for in-use storage blocks is implemented with SQLite synchronized by Litestream.
- •Fly.io is integrating a Litestream VFS that enables point-in-time queries from object storage and has been made optionally read-write to address early write needs.