Faster Docker Builds with Depot

Bret is joined by Kyle Galbraith and Jacob Gillespie, co-founders of Depot, to discuss their new solution to slow Docker builds.

If you've never dug into some of the details of Dockers BuildKit, that's the engine behind your Docker build command, then this episode is for you. I'm fairly confident that everyone who uses Docker will eventually come upon the problems that Kyle and Jacob were trying to solve with Depot. Their focus is on speeding up your Docker builds by doing them remotely, in a transparent way.

They avoid you needing to rethink your workflows and CI automations and provide a CLI tool that's a drop-in replacement for the Docker build command. In this episode, we walked through the problems they can solve today with what I would call a unified shared build cache for your whole team, including your CI and automation tools.

The way they are going about speeding up the Docker builds is something I wished Docker had done for us all along. I think it's still early days for the Depot product, but if you're suffering with long build image times it's already mature enough to be something I would consider as a replacement for the traditional Docker engine builds that we're all used to.

Streamed live on YouTube on January 12, 2023.

Unedited live recording of this show on YouTube (Ep. #198). Includes demos.

★Topic Links★
Depot website
Depot on Twitter

Creators & Guests

• Bret Fisher - Host
• Beth Fisher - Producer
• Cristi Cotovan - Editor
• Kyle Galbraith - Guest
• Jacob Gillespie - Guest

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• (00:00) - DDT MAIN
• (00:04) - Intro
• (00:53) - Bret's intro
• (02:24) - Main show
• (02:33) - Introducing the guests
• (02:53) - Today's topic
• (03:07) - Where did the idea for Depot come from?
• (04:26) - How it started
• (06:37) - Describing the problems
• (07:59) - The caching problem
• (09:49) - Docker caching default and in CI
• (12:45) - What is cache busting?
• (14:23) - Being deliberate about your CI environment
• (15:23) - What problems is Depot trying to solve?
• (17:27) - Replacing the Docker CLI with Depot
• (22:13) - Building for multi-platform
• (26:53) - Question
• (30:13) - Question
• (32:14) - Demo intro
• (32:45) - Modes of hosting
• (33:29) - Question
• (34:33) - What else does the UI offer?
• (38:21) - Getting started with Depot
• (39:28) - What's on the horizon?
• (40:30) - Outro