Launch HN: Depot (YC W23) – Fast Docker Builds in the Cloud

Hey HN! We’re Kyle and Jacob, the founders of Depot ( https://depot.dev ), a hosted container build service that builds Docker images up to 20x faster than existing CI providers. We run fully managed Intel and Arm builders in AWS, accessible directly from CI and from your terminal. Building Docker images in CI today is slow. CI runners are ephemeral, so they must save and load the cache for every build. They have constrained resources, with limited CPUs, memory, and disk space. And they do not support native Arm or multi-platform container builds, and instead require emulation. Over 4 years of working together, we spent countless hours optimizing and reoptimizing Dockerfiles, managing layer caching in CI, and maintaining custom runners for multi-platform images. We were working around the limitation of multi-platform builds inside of GitHub Actions via QEMU emulation when we thought "wouldn't it be nice if someone just offered both an Intel and Arm builder for Docke