jargon

Platform & DevOps·Packaging: containers and images

the build was instant on your laptop and takes six minutes on the runner, because the runner starts empty every time.

Build cache

Also calledlayer cache, image build cache

The store of previously built layers a build reuses instead of re-running the step. Locally it is free and invisible; in CI it is a thing you have to deliberately mount, export or pull, and the single largest cause of slow pipelines is that nobody did. A cache hit depends on the exact command and the checksum of what it copies, so a build that touches a timestamp or a lockfile on every run has no cache at all.

Commonly confused with