Depot Accelerates Build Times for Its Customers Using Amazon EC2
On AWS, we can create tools and systems to make builds exponentially faster with a one-line code change.
Kyle Galbraith
Cofounder and CEO, DepotIn a Nutshell
In enterprise software, accelerating the pace of innovation and iteration is essential to having a competitive advantage. One bottleneck in the developer pipeline is the speed at which developers can build software. The slower a build is, the slower new features get delivered, and, ultimately, the slower businesses can iterate. Using Amazon Web Services (AWS), Depot offers solutions that expedite development workflows by changing one line of code. Its flagship remote container-build service can speed up container image builds by up to 40 times. And its GitHub Actions runners can quicken entire continuous integration (CI) workflows by up to 3 times with accelerated caching and 30 percent faster compute. With its innovative solutions, Depot removes the bottlenecks of slow build performance from the developer pipeline and saves enterprises thousands of hours per month.
Boosting the Performance of Software Builds
Depot, an AWS Partner, accelerates builds by providing tools and compute resources that facilitate better performance, advanced intelligent caching, and key insights into where builds are bottlenecked. “The main drivers of adopting and going all in on AWS were its maturity and reliability,” says Kyle Galbraith, cofounder and CEO at Depot.
Helping Customers Increase Build Velocity and Lower Costs
By changing one line of code to move its CI workloads to Depot GitHub Actions runners, the retail company implemented Depot’s solutions in less than 1 day and cut key build times from 12 to 5 minutes. “Speed to deployment is one of our foundational pillars,” says Galbraith. “When we build a new product, our focus is making it exceptionally fast.” Depot’s solutions are powered by Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which provides secure and resizable compute capacity for virtually any workload. And each customer launches on a single-tenant Amazon EC2 instance to warrant security.
Using Depot’s solutions, the retail company lowered its CI costs by 55 percent and increased its monthly build velocity by more than 25 percent, significantly reducing its overall build times. “Because our mission is to be an extremely fast place to build software, we’re always incrementally increasing the speed of builds,” says Galbraith. With the increase in build velocity and innovation speed, Depot’s retail customer was able to dedicate more engineering resources to a big migration project that helped reduce its technical debt. The retail company completed the project two-quarters ahead of schedule.
Unlocking Exponentially Faster Development
Depot collaborates closely with its customers, leveraging AWS tools to help enterprises adopt solutions that foster both speed and innovation. Moving forward, Depot will expand its footprint to find breakthrough speed in other areas of the developer pipeline. "Our focus is helping developers understand that builds don't have to be slow," says Galbraith. "On AWS, we can create a platform to make developers exponentially faster, and that will accelerate innovation from enterprises to individuals.