Seekable OCI: Lazy-Loading Container Images via Range-Request Indexing
Summary
Seekable OCI introduces SOCI, a lazy-loading architecture for OCI container images that avoids downloading entire images during startup. It builds an external index mapping files to byte ranges within compressed layers and serves them through a FUSE-mounted interface via HTTP range requests, enabling faster pod startup on Kubernetes. Production deployments on AWS EKS/ECS demonstrate significant speedups, with the system working on unmodified images and registries.