Designing a portable GCS static site

Published: August 13, 2025 · By Invecture Labs Engineering

Google Cloud Storage (GCS) is often overlooked as a primary hosting platform in favor of specialized providers. However, for AI/HPC organizations already operating within GCP, using GCS for documentation and engineering logs provides a "zero-overhead" solution that integrates natively with your existing IAM and CI/CD pipelines.

The Ideal Layout

To ensure portability (making it easy to move between buckets or regions), we follow a strict directory structure that separates concerns between immutable assets and mutable content.

bucket-root/
├── index.html           # Main entry
├── assets/              # Immutable (fingerprinted)
│   ├── main.d41d.css
│   └── logo.webp
├── blog/                # Versioned content
│   ├── index.json       # Metadata for dynamic loading
│   └── post-name.html
├── sitemap.xml
└── robots.txt

Critical Metadata: Cache-Control

The secret to a "fast" GCS site isn't just the backbone—it's the browser cache. GCS allows you to set the Cache-Control header per object. We recommend these defaults:

• HTML: public, max-age=3600, must-revalidate (allows for quick rollbacks).
• Assets: public, max-age=31536000, immutable (long-term caching for fingerprinted files).

Infrastructure as Code (Terraform)

Don't click around the console. Define your bucket and its website configuration with Terraform to ensure reproducibility across dev/prod environments.

resource "google_storage_bucket" "static_site" {
  name          = "www.invecturelabs.com"
  location      = "US"
  storage_class = "STANDARD"

  website {
    main_page_suffix = "index.html"
    not_found_page   = "404.html"
  }

  cors {
    origin          = ["https://invecturelabs.com"]
    method          = ["GET", "HEAD"]
    response_header = ["*"]
    max_age_seconds = 3600
  }
}

Conclusion

By treating your GCS bucket like a high-performance filesystem rather than just a "dumping ground" for files, you can achieve sub-100ms TTFB globally without the complexity of a managed hosting provider.