Why Is Every Node Pulling the Same Image? Meet Spegel

Node A has already pulled nginx, Node B has not, and a pod just landed on B. What Spegel does in that moment, and why it is safe when the answer is nothing: a DaemonSet that turns containerd's own content store into a cluster-wide mirror, finds peers through a Kademlia DHT, falls back to the real registry on a miss, and stores nothing of its own. Plus the containerd settings that make it work, the one that silently makes it do nothing, and a kind cluster to watch it on.

November 2026