Lazily Pulling Container Images with Podman and SOCI Snapshotter

BuildBuddy has introduced a performance improvement that makes pulling container images about ten times faster on its hosted execution service, reducing customer build and test times and improving the ability to autoscale the BuildBuddy executor pool. The company uses Podman as its default container runtime but supports Docker and Firecracker as well. Lazy image distribution is used to address the challenge of slow image pull latency after a cold start, which directly slows down customer builds and tests and limits autoscaling capabilities. The SOCI Snapshotter acts as a local container layer store that can be used by Podman to retrieve image layers in place of the remote registry. BuildBuddy has made some modifications to support lazy image distribution for images stored in private container registries, and the company has observed an almost tenfold decrease in image pull latency after cold start with this setup.