Accelerating software builds using AWS Graviton4 with Depot

Founded in 2022, Depot processes software builds and CI/CD workflows for customers ranging from early-stage companies to publicly traded corporations. The company chose AWS early on in its cloud journey to build a robust, reliable, enterprise-grade infrastructure to deliver its solutions for its customers. Through continuous innovation in compute technology, from custom processors to advanced solutions, AWS delivers the security, reliability, and performance needed for applications to scale as Depot evolves.

From its founding, Depot offered multiple compute options to its customers, including AWS Graviton-based Amazon EC2 instances, which provide the best price performance for cloud workloads running on Amazon EC2. When AWS Graviton4-based instances became available, Depot recognized an opportunity to enhance its competitive position. The company chose to migrate its entire fleet from Graviton3 to Graviton4 instances, improving performance for its customers without changing their existing workflows or configurations.

Depot developed a comprehensive migration plan that focused on two key areas of its infrastructure: customer build processing and internal service operations. During the technical implementation, Depot aimed to maintain service continuity while upgrading its compute foundation. The company switched configuration settings from Graviton3 to Graviton4 instance types across its entire fleet and conducted validation tests before finalizing the transition.

For customer-facing workloads, Depot adopted Amazon EC2 C8g instances, which are ideal for compute-intensive workloads, and Amazon EC2 M8g instances, which provide the best price performance for general-purpose workloads. The company selected these instances based on what customers were building and how they integrated with CI providers like GitHub Actions and build tools such as Docker. Depot’s team matched the appropriate instance types to the computational demands of each customer’s development workflows, optimizing resource allocation for different build scenarios.

For internal operations, Depot deployed Amazon EC2 R8g instances, which are ideal for memory-intensive workloads. These instances handle Depot’s backend infrastructure, including the specialized caching systems that support the company’s build acceleration capabilities. By migrating its own infrastructure alongside customer workloads, Depot maintained consistency across its entire compute architecture and operational framework.

After migrating to Graviton4 instances, Depot saw significant improvements across its overall performance metrics compared with the previous setup. For CI/CD pipeline workloads specifically, Graviton4-based instances proved particularly effective, reducing build times by 30 percent. The faster completion of builds means customers pay for less compute time. Because Depot charges customers on a per-second basis, the 30 percent reduction in build time translates directly to a 30 percent cost reduction for customers. Across its broader infrastructure, Depot has also seen a 20 percent cost improvement by switching to Graviton-based instances from Intel-based instances.

The performance improvements were quickly evident to Depot’s customers. “Many of our customers care a lot about CI/CD performance and monitor this performance across their engineering teams,” says Jacob Gillespie, cofounder and chief technology officer at Depot. “After we switched to Graviton4-based instances, several of them reached out to us and showed us how their CI/CD times improved. They were very excited.”

Moving forward, Depot plans to expand its CI/CD provider and build tool integrations to support other build types and align with its customers’ needs—especially as AI-driven development puts greater demands on CI/CD pipelines. Depot’s commitment to staying current with the latest technology positions the company to maintain its competitive edge. “Our customers come to us for great performance. If we don’t deliver, they will find someone who does,” says Gillespie. “We build on AWS because AWS delivers the performance, stability, and latest technology that our customers demand.”