Static sites: server-even-less

When I was about to create kodemaker.no ten years ago, I had just read and reread the book High Performance Web Sites by Steve Souders. I loved that book! Fast websites were definitely my thing. Steve and I were best friends – at least in my head. I remember standing on the train platform. Ten minutes until the train arrived? Down into the bag and up with the book to read a bit more (books were made from dead trees back then).

Anyway, it had to be fast, I was sure of that. Therefore, I was determined that the new pages should be pre-rendered. All content in flat files, served straight from the disk. No running server. You save countless milliseconds like that.

I used the Christmas holiday to create Stasis, a toolkit for building static websites, so that work in January could start at a full sprint. January was a blast. It turned out as great as I had dreamed. On the production server, all HTML and CSS were pre-rendered on disk, served by NGINX, with Varnish in front.

Thanks to Varnish, the files were even served straight from memory.

So yes, the websites were lightning-fast, but something else was fast too. Much faster, actually, than I had anticipated.

A Simpler Model

Have you ever considered how much time and mental capacity is consumed because we need to deal with a running server process?

Neither had I.

At least not until this project.

Beyond compilation and build steps, the running process has its own runtime, with its own dependencies, its own state, its own bugs. There are asynchronous calls, from frontend to frontend-for-backend to backend to database. It needs to be operated and maintained, monitored, and logged. Exceptions and downtime. Model, View, Controller. It’s a hassle.

Okay, it’s often necessary… a necessary hassle. But what about the times we don’t need this running process? Many websites just need to present information. Suddenly, the solution can be dramatically simpler.

That’s what surprised me back then, ten years ago. Without a server running, there were so many considerations I could ditch, like a burden I no longer needed to bear. My job became much simpler. I crunched some data and spat some HTML out onto a disk. As a build step. Done.

No wonder it was easy to create.

Server Nope

Or was it server nada?

Regardless, the model to get this online became incredibly simple. Back in the day, I used nginx and a filesystem. More recently, even better: We store all the files in a bucket on S3 / Google Cloud Storage and point the load balancer directly at it.

It’s so stress-free that you can’t help but laugh.

This is the true serverless.