Kubernetes Serverless Without the Vendor Lock-In (Here's How)

A practical walkthrough of implementing serverless-style scale-to-zero behavior on Kubernetes without Knative or AWS Lambda. Using KEDA, Envoy Gateway, and Prometheus, the setup progressively scales a deployment from a static replica to full autoscaling and finally to zero replicas when idle. The key challenge — not losing requests when pods are at zero — is solved by KEDA's HTTP add-on interceptor, which buffers incoming requests while pods spin up. The architecture uses standard Kubernetes primitives (Deployments, Services, HTTPRoutes) with no vendor lock-in, and Crossplane automates cluster provisioning with all required components. Trade-offs include cold start latency and interceptor memory limits, but the approach is argued to be practical for apps with variable or bursty traffic.