Hey, we’re Kyle and Jacob, the founders of Depot, a hosted container build service for Docker images, and we’re excited to launch our new product: managed GitHub Actions runners for AWS!
While GitHub Actions is one of the most prevalent CI providers, Actions is slow for a few reasons:
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! 💪
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VX5Z-k1mGc8
Using AWS as our compute provider has a few advantages:
m7a
instances, which are typically 30%+ more performant than alternatives.us-east-1
, so interacting with artifacts, cache, container registries, or the internet at large is quick.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.
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!