Depot

Build faster. Waste less time.

Winter 2023

Active

Build faster. Waste less time.

Depot is a build acceleration platform making builds up to 40x faster for Docker containers and GitHub Actions. Companies like PostHog, Wistia, Appsmith, and Secoda use Depot to save tens of hours of build time every day. We offer a remote container build service for building Intel & Arm Docker images, from your CI or local machine, up to 40x faster. Our container builds come with in-depth build insights, ephemeral registries, and instant cache sharing across your team. Finally, we also offer our own Depot GitHub Actions Runners that brings all the speed of Depot to your entire GitHub Actions workflow at half the cost of GitHub-hosted runners, and up to 10x faster builds. Simply change the runs-on label of your existing workflow to route jobs to Depot runners. Kyle and Jacob worked together as staff engineers for 4.5 years at Thorn and Era Software, before founding Depot. Depot is their solution to the wildly inefficient container build tooling and non-performant CI systems they encountered throughout their careers.

Active Founders

Kyle Galbraith

Founder

Kyle Galbraith is the Co-Founder & CEO of Depot. He and Jacob Gillespie (CTO) built Depot after being faced with the same challenges time and time again surrounding slow CI builds across all generic providers. He is originally from Portland, Oregon but relocated to Montpellier, France in October 2022 to immerse himself in French culture with his wife who is originally from the area.

Jacob Gillespie

Founder

Cofounder and CTO of Depot. US expat living in the UK.

The Problem

While GitHub Actions is one of the most prevalent CI providers, Actions is slow for a few reasons:

GitHub uses underpowered CPUs.
Network throughput for cache and the internet at large is capped at 125 MB/s.
Total cache storage is limited to 10GB per repo.
Larger runners are expensive and take a long time to start running jobs.

The Solution

Depot-managed runners solve this! Rather than your CI jobs running on GitHub’s slow compute, Depot routes those same jobs to powerful EC2 instances. And not only is this faster, it’s also 1/2 the cost of GitHub Actions!

We do this by launching a dedicated instance for each job, registering that instance as a self-hosted Actions runner in your GitHub organization, and then terminating the instance when the job is finished.

We've also integrated the runners with our existing distributed storage cluster that we use for Docker image builds for up to 10x faster cache throughput! 💪

Demo Video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VX5Z-k1mGc8

Tech Details

Using AWS as our compute provider has a few advantages:

We launch fast m7a instances, which are typically 30%+ more performant than alternatives.
Each instance has high-throughput networking of up to 1.5 GB/s, hosted in us-east-1, so interacting with artifacts, cache, container registries, or the internet at large is quick.
Each instance has a public IPv4 address, so you’re not sharing any rate limits with anyone else.

By integrating the runners with the distributed cache system (backed by S3 and Ceph) that we use for Docker build cache, jobs automatically save/restore cache from this cache system, with speeds of up to 1.5 GB/s, and without the default 10 GB per repo storage limit.

Additionally, the runners are located in the same VPC as our Docker build service, so for anyone using both, built containers are now able to --load back into CI for testing much faster than they would over GitHub’s default network.

We build our machine image from GitHub's image definition, so all the same software you expect is pre-installed. Support for Arm runners, powered by Graviton instances, is in beta now.

Getting Started

You can sign up at https://depot.dev/sign-up for a free trial if you’d like to try it out with your own workflows!

Other Company Launches

⚡ Depot - a faster way to build Docker images

A remote container build service that is 3-14x faster than CI providers, with emulation-free support for both Intel & Arm architectures

Read Launch ›