Flyte started as a small project inside a team at Lyft. I was the tech lead and I wanted to get all the MLes and the scientists more productive so we build a contraption called model builder. It was terrible. It was initially built on top of airflow with a lot of blood sweat, tears and pain. We decided to write a slightly better version on top of other container orchestras available at that time, the name model builder still stuck on in this new product became extremely popular inside Lyft, but it was still Goldberg machine, so we finally decided to rewrite the entire system on top of Cubanitas and we realize it did way more than just model building and we hated that name. We went through an exercise of naming it and people came up with interesting and weird names. One name I remember was called mamba. Another one was aqueduct some others were even worse so then I was like what if we say we take your models and data on a flight and then just playing with that it rolled off the tongue so I decided to think about it about how I can pay homage to the company where it started call Lyft and the we did a few anagrams and found the word Flyte. It did not mean anything to anybody and I was intentional. It rolled off the tongue very quickly and in a quick test with the various users, we found that they like the word flight. It was memorable and that’s how I came up with the name.

And we decided to have some fun with it. That’s why flight propeller flightkit - admin was going to be called flyte control tower, Flyte copilot for data management etc