Sharing prepopulated container image caches among container execution environments

Abstract

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.