Top all-time · #2102
Depot
Company blog · depot.dev/blog · on HN as kylegalbraithprogrammingsystems
Depot is the company blog at depot.dev, writing about programming and systems. Since 2022, 36 different Hacker News readers have linked it 132 times, most often “Reverse engineering the GHA cache to improve performance (2024)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-29, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (13) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Depot's blog and docs for technical content on Docker builds, BuildKit, GitHub Actions caching and EC2 boot times, including example Dockerfiles. Commenters mostly cite the posts as sources.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 13 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Depot provides fast source control, builds, CI runners, sandboxes, caches, and registries to ship reliable software at machine scale.
Most-linked posts?
- Reverse engineering the GHA cache to improve performance (2024)4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2024-05-13
- Show HN: Depot – fast, remote Docker container builds3 people · 17 mentions · first linked 2022-06-10
- /3 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2023-09-22
- Making EC2 boot time faster3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-05-23
- Building Containers from Scratch: Layers2 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2024-01-15
- Top common Dockerfile linting issues2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-10-29
- Now Available: Depot CI2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2026-03-24
- Depot.dev Dockerfile Explorer2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-10-20
- Now Available: Depot Registry2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-03-04
- What Is a "Tar" File?2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-11-21
What Hacker News says?
Excited to see AOC back and I think it was a solid idea to get rid of the global leaderboard. We (Depot) are sponsoring this year and have a private leaderboard [0]. We’re donating $1k/each for the top five finishers to a charity of their choice. [0] https://depot.dev/events/advent-of-code-2025
Comment linking /events/advent-of-code-2025
on “Advent of Code 2025”Submitted Making EC2 boot time faster as a story · 275 points
HN discussionFounder of Depot[0] here. I'm disappointed by this change and by the impact this is going to have on all self-hosted runner customers, not just us. In my view, this is GitHub extracting more revenue from the ecosystem for a service that is slow, unreliable, and that GitHub has openly not invested in. We will continue to do our best to provide the fastest GHA runners and keep them cheaper than GitHub-hosted runners.…
Comment linking /
on “Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions”Submitted BuildKit in depth: Docker's build engine explained as a story · 174 points
HN discussionFounder of Depot[0] here. To answer your idea, at Depot we already have this concept internally. In fact, Depot isn't reliant on webhooks at all to run your jobs. One of the reasons we can be up running your jobs when GitHub webhooks service is down. Effectively, we listen to a different system to know you have a job that needs to be run. To your second statement, I generally agree. Sounds strange to say given we're…
Comment linking /
on “Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions”Submitted Show HN: Depot – fast, remote Docker container builds as a story · 141 points
HN discussionCheck out this Dockerfile template if you're building Rust in Docker: https://depot.dev/docs/container-builds/how-to-guides/optima... What makes Depot so fast is that they use NVMe drives for local caching and they guarantee that the cache will always be available for the same builders. So you don't suffer from the cold-start problem or having to load your cache from slow object storage.
Comment linking /docs/container-builds/how-to-guides/optimal-dockerfiles/rust-dockerfile
on “The Pain That Is GitHub Actions”Submitted Disk I/O bottlenecks in GitHub Actions as a story · 106 points
HN discussionJust flagging that Depot now has macOS and Windows runners [0] as well if you're looking for even faster builds. I also recognize that constantly reevaluating runners isn't on everyone's priority list. [0] https://depot.dev/docs/github-actions/runner-types
Comment linking /docs/github-actions/runner-types
on “The Pain That Is GitHub Actions”Submitted Reverse engineering the GHA cache to improve performance (2024) as a story · 36 points
HN discussionThis was an interesting read and highlighted some of the author's top-of-mind pain points and rough edges. However, in my experience, this is definitely not an exhaustive list, and there are actually many, many, many more. Things like 10 GB cache limits in GitHub, concurrency limits based on runner type, the expensive price tag for larger GitHub runners, and that's before you even get to the security ones. Having be…
Comment linking /products/github-actions
on “The Pain That Is GitHub Actions”Submitted Building Containers from Scratch: Layers as a story · 28 points
HN discussionGitHub Actions started off great as they were quickly iterating, but it very much seems that GitHub has taken its eye of the ball and the improvements have all but halted. It's really upsetting how little attention Actions is getting these days (< https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/categories/act... > tells the story -- the most popular issues have gone completely unanswered). Sad to see Earthly halting d…
Comment linking /
on “The Pain That Is GitHub Actions”Submitted Building untrusted container images safely at scale as a story · 27 points
HN discussionYou should try this with Depot [0]. I’m a founder of it and this is definitely one of the use cases we built it for. We persist your layer cache to a real NVMe device and reattach that automatically across builds. No more needing to save your layer cache via networks or resource constrained GitHub Actions cache. [0] https://depot.dev
Comment linking /
on “The future of large files in Git is Git”Submitted Accelerating Docker Builds by Halving EC2 Boot Time as a story · 20 points
HN discussionIf you want even fast startups restarting stopped instances is apparently faster https://depot.dev/blog/faster-ec2-boot-time
Comment linking /blog/faster-ec2-boot-time
on “Amazon S3 Adds Put-If-Match (Compare-and-Swap)”Submitted Now Available: Depot Registry as a story · 10 points
HN discussionDepot [0] founder here. Thanks for the mention. We're also planning on bringing a bit of a different take to GitHub Action runners that's not tied to Hetzner directly. It will be entirely open-source as well, so you can take it and run it on your own instances if you'd like. Similar to how Depot supports self-hosted builders in your own AWS account [1]. [0] https://depot.dev/ [1] https://depot.dev/docs/self-hosted/a…
Comment linking /docs/self-hosted/architecture
on “Show HN: Open-source x64 and Arm GitHub runners”Submitted Show HN: Depot – fast, remote Docker container builds as a story · 10 points
HN discussionDive is an amazing tool in the container/Docker space. It makes life so much easier to debug what is actually in your container. When we were first getting started with Depot [0], we often got asked how to reduce image size as well as make builds faster. So we wrote up a quick blog post that shows how to use Dive to help with that problem [1]. It might be a bit dated now, but in case it helps a future person. Dive a…
Comment linking /blog/build-context
on “Dive: A tool for exploring a Docker image, layer contents and more”Submitted We cut GitHub Actions queue times by 4x as a story · 8 points
HN discussionFounder of Depot here. We provide faster and more reliable GitHub Actions runners (as well as other build performance services) at half the cost of GitHub [0] [0] https://depot.dev/
Comment linking /
on “GitHub Actions has a package manager, and it might be the worst”Submitted Using PlanetScale to reduce the impact of thundering herd as a story · 7 points
HN discussionThis is just another thing in a laundry list of things from Docker that feel developer-hostile. Does it make sense? Sure, it might, given the old architecture of Docker Hub. I'm biased (i.e., co-founder of Depot [0]) and don't have the business context around internal Docker things. So this is just my view of the world as we see it today. There are solutions to the egress problem that negates needing to push that do…
Comment linking /
on “Docker limits unauthenticated pulls to 10/HR/IP from Docker Hub, from March 1”Submitted GitHub is the wrong shape for this new world as a story · 6 points
HN discussionAs someone mentioned, GitHub has something to prevent this, but it's unclear (or at least undocumented) what. We at Depot [0] work around this by guaranteeing that a new runner brought online has a unique public IP address. Thus avoiding the need to login to Docker to pull anything. Subsequently, we also do the same unique public IP address for our Docker image build product as well. Which helps with doing image bui…
Comment linking /
on “Docker limits unauthenticated pulls to 10/HR/IP from Docker Hub, from March 1”Submitted Show HN: Depot CI API – Programmable CI as a story · 6 points
HN discussionThis is a fascinating read. We run a Ceph storage cluster for persisting Docker layer cache [0]. We went from using EBS to Ceph and saw a massive difference in throughput. Went from a write throughput of 146 MB/s and 3,000 IOPS to 900 MB/s and 30,000 IOPS. The best part is that it pretty much just works. Very little babysitting with the exception of the occasional fs trim or something. It’s been a massive improvemen…
Comment linking /blog/cache-v2-faster-builds
on “Ceph: A Journey to 1 TiB/s”Submitted How BuildKit Parallelizes Your Builds as a story · 6 points
HN discussion
