The AWS Developers Podcast The future of fast builds: inside Depot's cloud-native CI/CD platform
Aug 22, 2025
Jacob Gillespie, Co-founder and CTO of Depot, shares insights on revolutionizing CI/CD with lightning-fast builds. He discusses achieving up to 40x speed improvements using AWS services and innovative caching techniques. Dive into the intricacies of Depot’s architecture, including EC2 instance management and distributed storage solutions. Jacob also highlights effective RAM caching methods and the transition to MicroVMs, addressing challenges in macOS deployments and the importance of observability tools for optimizing workflows. A treasure trove for developers seeking speed and efficiency!
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Warm Stopped Instances To Slash Startup Time
- Warming and stopping EC2 instances cuts cold-starts from ~60s to under 5s by pre-provisioning AMIs and EBS.
- Starting stopped warmed instances on demand lets Depot pick compute type at request time.
Scale With Warm Inventory, Not Always-Running Hosts
- Depot keeps thousands of stopped warmed instances and cycles millions of instances monthly to match bursty build demand.
- They rebuilt autoscaling and inventory logic to select the right stopped instance per request.
Provide Base Images And Customer AMIs
- Keep a comprehensive base AMI mirroring common runner images so workloads run without changes.
- Offer customer-specific AMIs (GPU, drivers) deployed into their accounts for specialized needs.