[jacobwg]

In AWS - we launch either Intel or Arm EC2 instances depending on the requested build platform (or both for multi-platform builds). When a project's builds are running, they have sole control of that instance, which is terminated when the builds are done.

To make this performant we keep a certain number of spare "warm" machines ready for build requests so that you don't have to pay the instance launch time penalty yourself.

[debarshri]

Just to clarify, when you run depot build, does build run locally or it runs remotely in an ec2 instances? Also, it sounds like the instances is on your side, not on customers infrastructure. Compounding build time is a problem, but I think we solved it with buildkit cache. But the setup you are describing, if I understand correctly might be a no-go for enterprise customers. May be you are going after the mid-market companies, in that case it might work. Just an opinion from my side.

[jacobwg]

I think Kyle answered this below, about the option for enterprises to run the data plane of Depot in their own cloud account. In that model, the Depot CLI connects directly to that data plane without passing through any infrastructure on our side.

> I think we solved it with buildkit cache

One big thing we're doing here, if you're familiar with BuildKit cache, is providing builds a stable cache SSD that's reused between builds. This means we support all of BuildKit's caching features, including things like cache mounts that aren't directly supported in ephemeral CI environments. Plus Depot doesn't need to save or load the cache to a remote store like S3 or GitHub Actions cache, instead the previous cache is immediately available on build start.

This may not be any better or different than what you're doing, I just wanted to mention the detail for anyone familiar with trying to make BuiltKit more performant.

[alexeldeib]

It’s a client/server model with remote build kit, I believe.

> the setup you are describing, if I understand correctly might be a no-go for enterprise customers

Fwiw, I know at least buildbuddy operates in a similar space (hosted bazel cache/builds, client/server style).

[aidos]

I haven’t tried but I believe you can do either. You can use their api and tooling and it will connect to agents in your infra.

[kylegalbraith]

Hi there! Kyle here, the other half of Depot. This is correct, we have a self-hosted data plane model that larger enterprises can use if they want full control over the builders + build cache.

In that deployment model, the Depot control plane passes changes to make in the customers environment via a small agent they run in their account. Here is some docs we put together for anyone that wants to go into a bit more of the details: https://depot.dev/docs/self-hosted/architecture