How should we evaluate a move to a managed cloud build for container images?

[Benjamin92]

I'm trying to decide if we should move our container image builds from our current CI/CD pipeline to a fully managed cloud build service. The main thing holding me back is whether the loss of fine-grained control over the build environment and caching layers will actually slow us down more than the managed scalability will help.

[JeffreyP]

We moved a subset of builds to a managed cloud service last quarter. The queue time dropped and we could spin up more parallel jobs, which helped during release weeks. The tradeoff was losing some control over the exact base image versions and the ability to pin every step’s layers. On a few projects the first run after a change would re-create many layers and take longer than expected.

[NoraBD]

In our experience the layer reuse behaved oddly. Sometimes a common layer got reused, sometimes not, and it made build times bounce. It was hard to predict without diving into the service's behavior, which we couldn't customize.

[Kyle23]

We did a small pilot and saw quick wins on simple builds, but for heavier multi stage builds the managed service plus default layer reuse was not enough. We ended up spending time organizing dependencies to be friendlier to the managed environment.

[IsabellaG]

I keep telling myself maybe the real bottleneck is not the build environment but the artifacts storage and the network between the registry and runners.

[Gary_M]

We did a hybrid: move some workflows to cloud builds but keep a few critical pipelines on our own runners. That way if a build starts acting flaky we can switch back fast.

[Abigail_T]

If you are comfortable sharing what your typical build matrix looks like and how you measure layer reuse rates, we can compare apples to apples.