How Bastion cut build times by 6x and halved GitHub Actions spending with Depot | Depot

How Bastion cut build times by 6x and halved GitHub Actions spending with Depot

Bastion is building to help enterprises and financial institutions issue, manage, and scale stablecoins with built-in compliance and payments. Their platform is designed to enable institutions and enterprises to issue branded stablecoins, streamline payments, and earn yield on reserves.

By implementing Depot, Bastion achieved 6x faster builds while cutting their GitHub Actions spending in half. We spoke with CTO Jameel Al-Aziz to learn how they transformed their development pipeline with Depot, and improved their developer experience in the process.

The challenge

"I want to make sure I don't get in the way of my engineers so that they can build efficiently. I want them to not have build issues or broken builds. And I also want them to have builds that are fast, so that they can keep developing and keep iterating quickly. But at the same time, I don't want to break the bank by doing all that."

Jameel Al-Aziz, CTO

Prior to adopting Depot, the Bastion team had been facing several challenges, from build performance for Docker images and Rust projects, to increased GitHub Actions spend. This was causing friction in providing a great developer experience to their team without breaking the bank on services and tooling.

To tackle slow container image builds, they initially tried using Docker Build Cloud in an attempt to build Docker images more quickly, but experienced build instability with that platform. “It seemed like our builds really pushed the limits in terms of what the platform could handle, and we had all kinds of really frustrating issues,” Jameel said. “So while it sped things up, it very much annoyed our developers.”

At the same time, Bastion was adopting GitHub Actions as their primary CI provider for their Rust, Go, and TypeScript monorepo. But they quickly began to run into papercuts that hurt more and more, like a cache limit of 10 GB and the increased costs of GitHub-hosted runners.

“Ten gigabytes in today's world is nothing. It’s peanuts,” Jameel said. “With the 10 GB cache being shared across all your GitHub Actions builds, we were very quickly at 9.8 GB cache usage, which meant we were hitting the limits and perfectly valid dependencies were expunged from the cache.”

The solution

"Finally somebody's listening to community feedback. Somebody is saying hey, we hear you, this sucks, and we're gonna fix it for you. And it's not the author of the tool itself. It's Depot."

Jameel Al-Aziz, CTO

Jameel quickly became a fan of Depot, not only for its performance, but its hands-on user support approach. “After our first week of using the service, the Depot team proactively reached out and said: Your builds are working, but they’re not optimal. And they worked with me to improve the configuration.”

As Jameel and his team moved more of their container builds and GitHub Actions workflows over to Depot, they quickly realized the following performance, cost, and developer experience benefits:

• Cost optimization: Depot GitHub Actions Runners cost half of what GitHub was charging Bastion.
• Unlimited caching: Depot offers unlimited GitHub Actions caching, while GitHub limits to 10GB.
• Faster container builds: Depot made Bastion’s Docker container builds between 3x and 6x times faster.
• Cache visibility: With Depot’s dashboards, Bastion gained increased visibility into what their builds and cache were doing, bolstering their debugging capabilities.
• Hands-on support and collaboration: Within days of signing up, Depot’s co-founders proactively provided support and collaboration to further optimize Bastion’s builds.

Jameel was quick to point out Depot’s capabilities and performance as compared to native platforms like Docker and GitHub. In regards to GitHub, for example, he said, “Visibility into the GitHub Actions cache has been something that people have been asking GitHub for pretty much since GitHub Actions existed. But from day one, Depot had full visibility, full control.”

The measurable impact: faster and cheaper

"Do you wanna save money and go faster? Use Depot. Not trying Depot is basically saying I don't care about my developers, and I don't care about saving money."

Jameel Al-Aziz, CTO

With Depot, Jameel and his team have been able to increase the speed of delivery and reduce spend. Their adoption has resulted in these measurable impacts:

• 6x faster Rust Docker image builds. Rust images are now built between one and eight minutes, depending on how many layers are already in the cache and whether any dependencies have changed.
• 3x faster Go Docker image builds. Go images are now built in a minute or less.
• 2x increase in PR throughput.
• 50% reduction in GitHub Actions spend.

These improvements to build times, software spend, and developer experience have made it easier for Bastion to deliver and innovate faster.

As Jameel told us, a CTO has to constantly ask: “Do I throw money at this problem and make my developers happier, or do I save money but make things slower?”

“Depot seems to have broken that formula,” he said. “They said, hey, we’ll make it both cheaper and faster.”

Looking ahead

As Bastion continues to grow, they plan to further leverage Depot’s GitHub Actions runners' performance with additional workloads they are bringing online to support their expanded stablecoin issuance services and compliance requirements.

Bastion cut build times by 6x and halved GitHub Actions spending.