It's basically the same, just without you having to do any of the work to set up or maintain the remote machines.

When you start a container build with Depot, it will launch an Intel or an Arm VM running BuildKit (or both for a multi-platform image). It creates persistent SSD cache volumes for each project and attaches those to the build machines at launch. And it automates connecting your CLI to those machines over TLS. Then when the build is done, it shuts down those machines to save cost.

Depot does all that either in our cloud account, or you also have the option of connecting your own AWS account and Depot will act just as the orchestration layer.

So basically you get the remote build machines, but without needing to set them up, manage costs, configure access control, etc. But at its core, it's running the open-source version of BuildKit (the Depot CLI embeds the same Go library as `docker buildx build`).