Depot is making builds fast enough for the AI era
Blog post from WorkOS
Kyle Galbraith, CEO and founder of Depot, has been attending AWS re:Invent for six years, witnessing its growth and observing the increasing strain AI places on software delivery pipelines. Depot, initially focused on accelerating Docker image builds in CI environments, expanded post-Y Combinator 2023 into broader build acceleration tools, addressing new bottlenecks in the CI/CD process driven by AI's exponential code production. Galbraith emphasizes the importance of treating CI/CD as a production system requiring optimization and understanding, particularly as the October AWS outage revealed hidden dependencies in build systems. Depot prioritizes correctness over performance, ensuring transparency and trust in build optimizations, and introduces monitoring for outbound network traffic to prevent data exfiltration during builds. With a focus on API-first solutions, Galbraith highlights the flexibility and composability of developer tools, favoring infrastructure talks at re:Invent for insights into AWS's approach to redundancy and reliability, and enjoying company-sponsored happy hours for informal knowledge exchange.