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
We use depot for windmill (https://github.com/windmill-labs...) and it has simplified and accelerated so much our CI that it's hard to imagine being without. It was a one line replacement in our github actions and we could remove much of the complexity of our home-made cache system on our worker fleet while gaining in velocity. Thank you depot!
We've been using Depot at Better Stack for a while now, and I can't recommend it enough to anyone building any docker images! The build speed increase was the main driver, and that's valuable enough, but the team behind Depot really makes it shine.
Both Kyle and Jacob have been super helpful any time we had any questions related to our builds, and they even dived deep with us multiple times to optimize the Dockerfiles we have.
"🎉 Just tried Depot and I'm amazed! ⚡️ Native Intel & Arm builders, shared build cache, and a simple one-line code change for faster results. Kudos to Kyle and Jacob for creating this game-changer! 👏
Depot