Option to distribute work across multiple hosts

[WanzenBug]

We recently started migrating our container image build process to use buildx bake. So far it has been working great, with only minor issues. In our setup there is a single "bake" invocation, which eventually results in hundreds (slightly different) container images.

We wanted to speed up the build process and were wondering if there is a way to configure buildx so that it does not always pick the first node that satisfies some platform requirements. It seems that currently if we want to build for linux/amd64, it will always pick the first node in the configuration (we are using a remote driver with multiple nodes exposing buildkit via TCP).

I understand that this is needed in some cases when targets share some build stage, but in our case we have completely different targets defined in our bake file. Is there a way to achieve this? If not, would this be a feature that would be considered for inclusion? If so, I could start working on it.

[crazy-max]

We don't have any load balancing pattern with nodes, they are only used to match the target platform you want to build on. So even if you have 5 nodes supporting linux/amd64 platform for a builder, only the first node will be used. One way to scale would be to switch to the kubernetes driver as shown in: https://docs.docker.com/build/drivers/kubernetes/#scaling-buildkit

We recently started migrating our container image build process to use buildx bake. So far it has been working great, with only minor issues.

And thanks for using bake 🎉

[WanzenBug]

Thanks for the quick response.

One way to scale would be to switch to the kubernetes driver as shown.

That would probably be a bit too much effort for us, our builders are currently random collection of old hardware we do not need for other purposes 😄

I see this quote from the buildlkit page:

buildctl build can be called against randomly load balanced buildkitd daemons.

I'm wondering if this also applies to buildx bake and if that would work in our case? Or is there only a single connection created for one command invocation? 🤔