Spegel is a container registry cache and peer-to-peer distribution system for Kubernetes. It functions as an OCI image mirror and content addressable store that shares image layers between cluster nodes to reduce external registry traffic and latency.
The project implements a distributed hash table to locate image digests across the network, allowing nodes to retrieve content from peers rather than repeated external downloads. This architecture mitigates registry rate-limiting and provides offline image availability to prevent workload failures during registry outages.
The system covers capabilities for OCI image caching, distributed image delivery, and Kubernetes node provisioning. It includes mechanisms for tag resolution and registry mirroring to reduce cloud egress costs and accelerate pod startup times.