Depot has been quietly working to make Docker builds very, very fast

h/t to @sds for finding them, we now use them everywhere

Building @warpcast and @farcaster. Previously Coinbase, Brigade, Causes.

Depot has been quietly working to make Docker builds very, very fast

h/t to @sds for finding them, we now use them everywhere

https://depot.dev/

Technowatermelon. Elder Millenial. Building Farcaster. 

nf.td/varun

Are they doing anything novel? I read their docs and it sounds like they just have beefy machines and a cache. We've used kaniko cache to great effect for the same purpose. It wasn't trivial to set up but it was pretty easy.

Head of Engineering at Courtyard.io, bringing physical collectibles onchain. nf.td/joe /courtyard /backend

They have a blog post comparing themselves to kaniko but the example is cherry-picked and they're not using similarly sized build machines. I'm pretty sure they're just running docker on bigger instances with SSDs. Maybe that has product market fit, but it's not hard and I'd prefer to self host that.

I see how it could be useful if you want to spend absolutely zero effort on your own build infra, but I'm surprised there's enough value there to build a company around it. I hope they quickly find a ton of usage and all the cloud providers either acquire or copy them!

They've implemented genuinely useful improvements on top of Buildx with respect to --load and --push behavior to make them noticeably faster. 

Having managed the build infrastructure at a large co. in a previous life, this significantly improves QoL for folks that want that kind of infra with minimal effort.