What makes Depot so fast is that they use NVMe drives for local caching and they guarantee that the cache will always be available for the same builders. So you don't suffer from the cold-start problem or having to load your cache from slow object storage.
Thanks! We already use self-hosted runners on physical machines with NVMe drives that we assembled ourselves. I was wondering if there's something else you're doing for the caching.
Founder of Depot here. For image builds, we’ve done quite a bit of optimization to BuildKit for our image builders to make certain aspects of the builds fast like load, cache invalidations, etc.
We also do native multi-platform builds behind one build command. So you can call depot build —platform Linux/amd64,linux/arm64 and we will build on native Intel and ARM CPUs and skip all the emulation stuff. All of that adds up to really fast image builds.
What makes Depot so fast is that they use NVMe drives for local caching and they guarantee that the cache will always be available for the same builders. So you don't suffer from the cold-start problem or having to load your cache from slow object storage.