he Brief

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Depot is a remote container build service that's 3 to 14x faster than generic CI providers, self-hosted (AWS), and open-source, with emulation-free support for both Intel & Arm architectures.

Founders

CEO, Kyle Galbraith

CTO, Jacob Gillespie

Y Combinator (W23) Just Launched

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^{David J. Phillips @davj / 3:00 PM PST • January 20, 2023}  

It's 4pm, you've made it the airport, and the flight's at 6pm. You're flying domestic, and it's not a typically busy time of the year. Schedule is fine, you're on time, you're in good shape. As you walk through the terminal, you're presented with two options: walk unassisted, or take the conveyor. If you're like me, you'd walk. Personal preference, right? Well, let's say you turn the corner and hit a massive jam at security. What if, in that moment of realization, you could switch paths, change your decision? If you were aware of a better decision ahead of time - would you take it?

Well, if you're a software and platform engineer, the answer to this dilemma is an easy one: yes. In the engineering world, more often than not, speed reigns supreme. Especially when it comes to your CI (Continuous Integration) builds. With a full day of meetings, calls, and time spent fixing the problem du jour, one of the last things you want to encounter is a slow build. Enter Depot, a startup aiming to speed up the process by offering a remote container build service that is 3 to 14 times faster at building Docker images. It’s faster than doing so inside of generic CI providers, and they have the benchmark data to prove it. While what constitutes a “slow build” varies from person to person, the team at Depot believes 5 minutes is the threshold to annoyingness, and many engineers would agree. 

‎Docker container builds can be a real challenge to maintain running at reliable speeds, and it usually involves a Déjà vu-inducing process: optimize pipelines and Dockerfiles, reoptimize pipelines and Dockerfiles, implement custom runners for multi-platform builds, then repeat. A happy and productive day can quickly take a turn for the worse when these potentially compounding problems show up on an engineer's plate.

Slow builds can back up the delivery pipeline and distract a team from equally important workflows. Brainstorming new ideas, prototyping, solving problems for the userbase etc., can all add up to a lot of resource usage. With Depot, you'll have more time allotted to those aspects of your company and simultaneously increase the efficiency of your CI builds. Many founders would agree that boatloads of unforeseen problems are encountered daily, detracting bandwidth from enterprise-building. So why not make things easier with Depot?

Founded by Kyle Galbraith and Jacob Gillespie, the company’s founding is primarily attributable to their collective experiences of repeatedly encountering the same challenges with slow CI builds across all the generic providers. It’s common knowledge to those with first-hand experience that building docker images using popular CI providers (GitHub actions, CircleCi, etc.) can be slow. Saving and loading layer cache is slow, and runner resources are stressed thanks to limited CPUs, RAM, and disk space. Plus, Arm builds need emulation, which is inherently much slower than native, and as Arm continues to be increasingly important, mirroring the rise of popularity with devices like MacBook M1, Graviton, etc., Depot is offering a much-needed solution.

So how does Depot make builds faster? By constructing virtual machines with a focus on speed and quality. Each virtual machine is thoughtfully designed to optimize performance. Depot provides VMs running BuildKit, the backing build engine for Docker. Like a talented orchestra joining together to create a beautiful symphony, each VM that Depot manages consists of 4 CPUs, 8GB of memory, and a persistent 50GB SSD cache disk. Depot launches both native Intel and Arm machines on AWS, and users can choose to have their builder VMs launch in Depot’s AWS account, or their own if maintaining total control over their data is a priority. The Depot CLI is a drop-in replacement for docker build, as Docker buildx is embedded directly as a library. Anything that can currently be built with Docker can be built on Depot’s remote VMs. 

As real-world proof, look no further than the success fellow YC startup PostHog has had using Depot. They’ve reduced daily time spent on builds from 5+ hours to just 1 hour! Continuously benchmarked by Depot, comparing docker builds and depot builds, here are some stats to look at:

Temporal: (~14.5x faster, saving 7 hours over the last 10 builds)

Supabase: (~8.5x faster, saving 2 hours over the last 10 builds)

Depot offers a 14-day free trial so give it a try at https://depot.dev/sign-up. ‎With over 50k total builds ran through Depot in just 5 months of being public, and over 48k build minutes this month alone (*based on Dec 6th numbers), it's a proven solution with great results. The team at Depot welcomes user questions & feedback. Don't forget to follow them on Twitter! @depotdev

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