Similar primitive, but with two fundamentally different architectural trade-offs.

Sprites are fantastic for persistent, hardware-isolated sandboxes. But to achieve those instant creation speeds, they start from a minimal base Linux environment rather than a standard OCI image.

herd solves the same problem (sub-second Firecracker cold boots) but optimizes for a different workflow:

I wanted to keep the standard Dockerfile developer experience. herd uses a containerd devmapper pipeline to instantly carve out copy-on-write snapshots directly from standard OCI images. You get the microVM isolation and speed, but you bring your existing containers.

Sprites are a managed cloud primitive. herd is built as an embeddable control plane, it's a single Go binary you can deploy directly onto your own servers or inside an air-gapped enterprise VPC.

It's the same core Firecracker magic, just optimized for teams who want to keep their Dockerfiles and own their metal.