Changes to Docker Hub Autobuilds – Docker Blog

As many of you are aware, it has been a difficult period for companies offering free cloud compute [1]. Unfortunately, Docker’s Autobuild service has been targeted by the same bad actors, so today we are disappointed to announce that we will be discontinuing Autobuilds on the free tier starting from June 18, 2021. 

In the last few months we have seen a massive growth in the number of bad actors who are taking advantage of this service with the goal of abusing it for crypto mining. For the last 7 years we have been proud to offer our Autobuild service to all our users as the simplest way to set up CI for containerized projects. As well as the increased cost of running the service, this type of abuse periodically impacts performance for paying Autobuild users and induces many sleepless nights for our team 🙁

In April we saw the number of build hours spike 2X our usual load and by the end of the month we had already deactivated ~10,000 accounts due to mining abuse The following week we had another ~2200 miners spin up.

As a result of this we have made the hard choice to remove Autobuilds from our free plan as a mitigation for this abuse. While making these changes is never an easy choice, we’ve also continued to focus on making meaningful improvements to the performance of Autobuilds, including:

• Increasing the number of parallel builds to 5 for Pro and 15 for Team.
• Increase the build instance types, so you get a beefier machine to build on!
• Changed Autobuild to take advantage of BuildKit by default for improved build performance.

All of these improvements should see a faster and more stable build experience with lower queue times. If that sounds good and you are a free user who <3’s their Autobuilds, we are offering 20% off Docker Pro and Team for new and returning subscriptions through June 18, 2021 so you can continue using that Autobuild goodness.

If you’re part of the Docker Open Source program, and currently leveraging Autobuilds as part of a Free plan, we want to continue supporting you and we will be reaching out to make sure you will not be impacted by this change.   

We really appreciate your support and the community’s understanding as the whole industry battles against these abusive few. We want to keep providing awesome and magical services and hope we can find a better solution with everyone going forward.