Building a Blazing-Fast Website: Our Tech Stack Deep Dive
We just launched a revamped version of our website, and the speed boost? Let’s just say it’s been a game-changer. We’re so stoked about the performance gains and the streamlined development workflow that we wanted to share the tech stack that made it all happen. Because who doesn’t love a good tech deep dive, right?
Hugo: The Speed Demon at the Core
At the heart of our site’s performance is Hugo, a seriously fast static site generator built with Go. Seriously, fast. It whips up our entire website from Markdown content in milliseconds. This speed is crucial, not just for how quickly we can develop, but also for how quickly the site loads for our visitors. We chose Hugo for its simplicity, how easy it is to extend, and yeah, that blazing speed.
Crafting Our Digital Look and Feel
While there are some cool themes out there for Hugo, we decided to build our own. This gave us complete control over the design, letting us perfectly capture our brand’s vibe. We definitely checked out what’s available on Hugo Themes for inspiration – there are some great starting points – but going custom on hugoplate was the right move for us. Especially the modules repo is worth checking out
Styling and Interactivity: The Dynamic Duo
For styling, we went all-in on Tailwind CSS. If you haven’t tried it, you’re missing out. The utility-first approach is so efficient. We could rapidly prototype and tweak the design without writing a ton of custom CSS. It’s a front-end developer’s dream.
To add some interactive elements without the bloat of a big JavaScript framework, we used Alpine.js. It’s tiny, but it’s powerful. Perfect for things like modals, dropdowns, and other little UI touches that make a big difference.
Where It Lives: Kubernetes, Rook Ceph, and S3www
Our website is hosted on a Kubernetes cluster. This gives us the scalability and resilience we need to handle whatever traffic comes our way. But where do we keep all the files Hugo generates?
That’s where Rook comes in. It’s a cloud-native storage orchestrator for Kubernetes. We use it to manage a Ceph cluster, which gives us distributed and highly available storage. And within Ceph, we’ve got an S3-compatible interface, so we can use tools that already work with S3.
To actually get our website files served on the web, we use s3www. It’s a neat tool that directly serves from S3 within our Kubernetes setup.
Automating the Flow: GitHub Actions
Our whole build and deployment process is automated with GitHub Actions. Whenever we push changes to the repo, GitHub Actions takes over. It builds the site with Hugo, runs tests, and then pushes the files to our s3 storage and is served by s3www. It’s seamless.
The Result: Fast, Scalable, and Easy to Work With
This combination of tools has given us a website that’s not just incredibly fast, but also super scalable and easy to maintain. Hugo, Tailwind, and Alpine.js have made our development process so much smoother. And with Kubernetes, Rook, and GitHub Actions handling the infrastructure and deployment, we can focus on building great content.
We’re really happy with how it all turned out. If you have any questions, hit us up! We’d love to chat about tech.