DOCKER LAYER CACHING: SPEED UP GITLAB CI/CD BUILDS

After improving our security setup, we encountered two significant challenges:

1. Go Build Performance Issue:

• Every time we pushed a small code change
• Our CI/CD pipeline spent 1 minute downloading the same Go packages
• Even a one-line change triggered a full dependency download

1. Docker Image Versioning Problem:

• Currently using ':latest' tag for our images
• Makes it difficult to track which version is deployed
• Rollbacks are risky and complicated

Let's solve these issues by:

• Implementing efficient Docker layer caching for Go builds
• Using Git commit IDs for precise image versioning

1. Docker Layer Caching Strategies

Build Time Comparisons

Performance Improvement:

• Average build time reduced from 81.5s to 20s
• ~75% faster builds with caching
• Consistent performance across subsequent builds

2. Image Tagging with Commit IDs

Why Not 'latest'?

• Ambiguous versioning
• Difficult to track deployments
• Rollback challenges
• Cache issues

Create parameter for Image Tag

Results

• Build time improvements
• Clear image versioning
• Reliable deployments

Resources

• Docker Layer Caching
• GitLab CI/CD Variables

Next Steps: Using AWS S3 in CI/CD pipeline

• Using S3 to store and sync docker-compose files
• Implementing proper IAM roles and policies for S3 access