Depot is a hosted container build service that builds Docker images up to 20x faster than existing CI providers. We run fully managed Intel and Arm builders in AWS, accessible directly from CI and from your terminal.
Hi Makers!
Kyle here with Jacob. We’re the founders of Depot, a hosted container build service that builds Docker images up to 20x faster than existing CI providers. We run fully managed Intel & Arm builders in AWS, accessible directly from CI and from your terminal.
Building Docker images in CI today can be extremely slow. CI runners are ephemeral, so they must save and load the cache for every build. They have constrained resources, with limited CPUs, memory, and disk space. And they do not support native Arm or multi-platform container builds and instead require emulation.
Building a Docker image locally also has problems that impede developer productivity. Developer machines may be resource constrained and require emulation building for another architecture that is not their machine (i.e., build an Arm image from an Intel developer machine). The build cache is also isolated to their machine and not shared across the team.
Over the years of working together, we’ve spent countless hours optimizing and reoptimizing Dockerfiles, managing layer caching in CI, and maintaining custom runners for multi-platform images.
So one day, we thought, "Wouldn't it be nice if someone just offered both an Intel and Arm builder for Docker images without having to run all that infrastructure ourselves". So around January of 2022, we started working on Depot, designed as the service we wished we had.
⚡ Depot provides managed VMs running BuildKit, the backing build engine for Docker. Each VM includes 16 CPUs, 32GB of memory, and a persistent 50GB SSD cache disk that is automatically available across builds—no saving or loading of layer cache over the network.
🔌 We launch both native Intel and native Arm machines inside of AWS. Zero emulation is required.
🐳 depot build is a drop-in replacement for docker build, so get faster builds with a literal one-line code change. We also have a number of integrations that match Docker integrations inside of CI providers like GitHub Actions.
👩💻 The entire build cache is shared. With a team, you get to reuse each other’s build results instantly.
🌐 We have an API that is in private beta that allows you to launch Docker image builds from your own code to build any arbitrary Dockerfile you may have without having to run your own BuildKit internally.
This combination of native CPUs, fast networks, and persistent disks significantly lowers build time—we’ve seen speedups ranging from 2x all the way to 50x (Depot benchmark for mastodon/mastodon). We have customers with builds that took three hours before that now take less than ten minutes.
We offer Depot as a hosted product, and we also offer the ability to self-host the Depot builders inside your own cloud account.
If you’re looking to get faster Docker image builds in CI, or locally, we’d love for you to try out what we’ve built and tell us what you think.
You can sign up at https://depot.dev/start, and get started with our 60-minute free tier or jump right into our pay-as-you-go plan. Feel free to hop into our community Discord as well to chat with us: https://discord.gg/yXPwf4vN
Tried out Depot really early on and was impressed with how easy to use it was! The team has been pumping out new features super fast and I am excited to see what they will build next.
Congratulations on the launch guys!
Tried out Depot really early on and was impressed with how easy to use it was! The team has been pumping out new features super fast and I am excited to see what they will build next.
Congratulations on the launch guys!
All of our image builds and Github Action Runners are powered by Depot. They've more than made up for the cost in time saved during our day to day dev.
We build 1000s of docker images and apps every week. Depot.dev has dramatically sped up critical workflows in our product! They enable us to deliver an awesome experience for building full-stack apps.
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