How this blog is served to you¶
Aug 16, 2025
5 min read
This blog is just static files, served from a container, behind a Kubernetes Ingress Controller.
So a container image containing a whole userland and a fullfledged webserver with all bells and whistle behind yet another fullfledged proxy.
Now I thought, we’re in 2025 and disk space is expensive (Yes, I wrote that before it actually became true). An Nginx container image is at least 80MiB, If I would write my very own static web server and run it from a scratch container image I could go down to a few hundred KiB and save… Let’s do the maths: a 1TB NVMe is around 70Euros on Amazon (yes it was) so that’s around 0.00007€ per MiB, assuming my container image will be around 500KiB that’s a whooping 0.005 Euro difference, bargain !
So I decided to spend a few days of my summer holidays and go save those 0.005 Euro.
Who need logic when you have a goal.
Anyhow, I started working on it with my friend Claude, got a functionnal prototype, and finaly came back to reason: this is useless.
Unless… unless my 20 monthly visitors were too much for Nginx to handle and I needed a much more performant web server. Let’s set a 1 Million Request per seconds target so if those 20 monthly visitors suddenly decided to connect at the exact same time and all refresh my blog page 50 000 times every seconds, they’d be safe.
So I started working again, and got to a 454KiB container image, that serves around 700K requests per seconds from my laptop’s Intel Gen12 and 1M+ RPS on my server !
I now host my blog with it, and you, who read, are safe to refresh this page if you want. Unless… unless the ingress controler is now the bottleneck ! Let’s work on a new K8S Ingress Controller (or Gateway API) that implements io_uring and use eBPF.
Details¶
KISS (that’s its name) for “Kubernetes Instant Static Server” is taking some shortcuts to achieve its goals.
The first and more important one is no disk I/O, all content is pre-loaded in RAM and all requests are pre-generated at startup time.
Traditional Static Servers (nginx, Apache):
Read files from disk per request
Generate HTTP headers per request
Multiple system calls per response
Filesystem caching complexity
KISS Approach:
All files loaded into memory at startup
HTTP responses pre-generated once
Single write() system call per request
Zero runtime filesystem operations
If you are also mindfull of saving some disk space and serving a ridiculous amount of request per seconds without any guaranty, you can also try KISS.