How Render Scaled Knative to 100k+ Web Apps

In November 2021, Render introduced a free tier for hobbyist developers, which saw a significant increase in adoption after Heroku discontinued its free offering, leading to infrastructure challenges. Render used Knative to manage the scalability of their free-tier services, which scale to zero when inactive to save resources. However, a surge in free-tier usage quadrupled the number of apps, straining networking components like Calico and kube-proxy due to increased updates and CPU consumption, causing latency issues. Render addressed these by removing unnecessary Kubernetes Services managed by Knative, such as the Placeholder, Public, and Private Services, optimizing traffic routing directly through the activator. This reduced CPU usage and improved network stability and latency but highlighted the need for a more tailored solution, suggesting future plans to develop a custom system better suited to Render's specific requirements.

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