Patent attributes
Techniques are described for sharing prepopulated container image caches among container execution environments to improve the performance of container launches. The container images used to prepopulate such a cache at a computing device supporting one or more container execution environments can include various container images that are used as the basis for a wide range of user-created containers such as, for example, container images representing popular operating system distributions, database servers, web-application frameworks, and so forth. Existing systems typically obtain these container images as needed at runtime when launching containers (for example, from a container registry or other external source), often incurring significant overhead in the container launch process. The use of a prepopulated container image cache can significantly improve the performance of container launches by making such commonly used container images available to container execution environments running at a computing device ahead of time.
