Depot Blog
depot.dev · Company blog · on HN since 2022
Depot's company blog covers fast container builds, CI, GitHub Actions caching, and related build infrastructure.
What HN saysHN commenters mention Depot as a vendor for faster builds and GitHub Actions alternatives; its founder joins threads, and it posts job listings.
34HN people shared it
13linked it in comments
67stories submitted
976story points
3 months agolast shared
2022people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Show HN: Depot – fast, remote Docker container builds6 people · 152 points · first shared 2022 · 58 comments on HN
- 2Reverse engineering the GHA cache to improve performance (2024)4 people · 37 points · first shared 2024 · 6 comments on HN
- 3Making EC2 boot time faster3 people · 275 points · first shared 2024 · 140 comments on HN
- 4Building Containers from Scratch: Layers2 people · 33 points · first shared 2024 · discussion on HN
- 5Now Available: Depot Registry2 people · 10 points · first shared 2025 · discussion on HN
- 6What Is a "Tar" File?2 people · 6 points · first shared 2024 · discussion on HN
- 7Top common Dockerfile linting issues2 people · 5 points · first shared 2023 · discussion on HN
- 8Now Available: Depot CI2 people · 5 points · first shared 2026 · 1 comments on HN
- 9Ultra Runners – Up to 3x faster GitHub Actions jobs2 people · 2 points · first shared 2024 · discussion on HN
- 10Depot.dev Dockerfile Explorer2 people · 2 points · first shared 2023 · discussion on HN
- 11Depot (YC W23) Cache v2: Faster builds and new features2 people · 2 points · first shared 2023 · 1 comments on HN
- 12BuildKit in depth: Docker's build engine explained1 people · 174 points · first shared 2024 · 44 comments on HN
- 13Disk I/O bottlenecks in GitHub Actions1 people · 108 points · first shared 2024 · 72 comments on HN
- 14Building untrusted container images safely at scale1 people · 27 points · first shared 2025 · 27 comments on HN
- 15Accelerating Docker Builds by Halving EC2 Boot Time1 people · 20 points · first shared 2025 · 9 comments on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
kylegalbraith · 2026-05-26
Founder of Depot here. To my knowledge, we are the first engine to support different syntaxes in this compatible way via Depot CI [0]. Great time to try it out and let us know your thoughts! We’ve built a lot of cool stuff into it like parallel steps, custom images, and a full CLI/API interface so you can literally everything without going into the web app.
[0] https://depot.dev
rmac · 2025-06-19
I looked into how rust does does it for rustup, and they have a pretty amazing set of gh actions to build for their architectures, I can't find the GH link now tho
for speed you can look for vendors like https://depot.dev/
jacobwg · 2025-06-02
Depot (W23) | Enterprise Support Engineer | Remote (UK, Europe) | Full-time | €100K - €160K | https://depot.dev
Depot is the fastest place to build software. We accelerate builds for customers using GitHub Actions, Docker, Bazel, Gradle, and more. We're seeking our first Enterprise Support Engineer to become a customer-facing expert on build optimization.
We're looking for someone with DevOps / CI consulting experience - you'll work directly with customers as the subject-matter expert on best practices, helping migrate legacy infrastructure, and working directly with the founders on product gaps.
Bonus: experience with Docker buildx, API integrations, or previous CI consulting.
For more details, and to apply: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/depot/jobs/NdCr76D-enterprise-su…
jalaziz · 2025-03-20
GitHub Actions started off great as they were quickly iterating, but it very much seems that GitHub has taken its eye of the ball and the improvements have all but halted.
It's really upsetting how little attention Actions is getting these days (<https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/categories/actions?discu… tells the story -- the most popular issues have gone completely unanswered).
Sad to see Earthly halting development and Dagger jumping on the AI train :(. Hopefully we'll get a proper alternative.
On a related note, if you're considering https://www.blacksmith.sh/, you really should consider https://depot.dev/. We evaluated both but went with Depot because the team is insanely smart and they've solved some pretty neat challenges. One of the cooler features is that their caching works with the default actions/cache action. There's absolutely no need to switch out popular third party actions in favor of patched ones.
jakubadamw · 2026-03-28
I’ve always been annoyed with the sequential character of jobs in GitHub Actions – that it is impossible to run steps in parallel, when applicable, without moving the job’s logic away from the the .yaml constructs into, say, bash scripts. My ideal runtime for a CI workflow should in my view leverage the model of a DAG and the parallelism made plausible by that to the fullest. Depot CI seems to have addressed this quite well – https://depot.dev/docs/ci/how-to-guides/parallel-steps. I migrated a side project to use it now, and it’s working great – I am seeing some great speed-ups.
TechSquidTV · 2024-08-13
This is fairly similar in concept to what we do over at depot.dev https://depot.dev/blog/depot-magic-explained
We've found that BuildKit has several inefficiencies preventing it from being as fast as it could be in the cloud, especially when dealing with simultaneous builds (common in CI). That led us to create our own optimized fork of BuildKit.
The number of fine-tuning knobs you can turn running a self-hosted BuildKit instance is limitless, but I also encourage everyone to try it as a fantastic learning exercise.
inyorgroove · 2024-07-31
This tool has really cool potential!
Just one problem I noticed imminently that prevents me from using this, the docker agent container[1] isn't multi-architecture, this will be an issue on Apple Silicon devices. This is something I have some experience setting up if you are looking for help, though will take some research to figure out how to get going in github actions etc.
1: https://github.com/evanrolfe/trayce_agent/
EDIT: quick search found this post, tested on a side project repo it works great: https://depot.dev/blog/multi-platform-docker-images-in-github-actions
abatilo · 2023-12-09
Awesome work! Congratulations on the launch. This reminds me a lot of https://depot.dev
I'm not officially affiliated with them at all. But I'm a big fan of their product.
It appears that one difference though is that Depot is more focused on just docker builds and y'all are more generalized runners Is that right?
solatic · 2023-10-24
Checkout Depot's example Dockerfile for node + pnpm: https://depot.dev/docs/languages/node-pnpm-dockerfile which is best-practices based even if you're not using Depot. They also explain each of the lines in the Dockerfile.
As someone struggling with Docker caching at work at the moment, I think your problem is less with pnpm and more with the difficulty of writing decent Dockerfiles.
sameermanek · 2025-07-23
Is it similar to this article posted a year ago:
https://depot.dev/blog/github-actions-cache
dijksterhuis · 2025-05-22
probably: saves money vs a fleet of consistently running instances
> From a billing perspective, AWS does not charge for the EC2 instance itself when stopped, as there's no physical hardware being reserved; a stopped instance is just the configuration that will be used when the instance is started next. Note that you do pay for the root EBS volume though, as it's still consuming storage.
https://depot.dev/blog/faster-ec2-boot-time
zerd · 2024-12-06
If you want even fast startups restarting stopped instances is apparently faster https://depot.dev/blog/faster-ec2-boot-time
miller_joe · 2025-03-18
Instances are constantly booting up because most instances live <30d. Boot time in terms of how soon a node is fully booted and joined to the EKS apiserver and ready for workloads is approx 2.5-3min. There are lot of parts involved in getting to this point though, some of which would not matter if you're not using EKS. Also this is not something we measure super closely as from a user perspective it is generally imperceptible.
A possibly better metric for your particular case (assuming you're interested in fastest bootup possibly achievable) is from our self-managed github-actions runners. Those boot times are in the 40-50s range. This is consistent with what others see, as far as I know. A good blog on this topic - including how they got boot-to-ready times down to 5s - that you might be interested in from the depot.dev folks: https://depot.dev/blog/github-actions-breaking-five-second-barrier