Pulling containers faster with eStargz

Pulling a container can be painfully slow. You can do everything in your power to optimize your Dockerfile to produce the smallest image possible, but still bottleneck startup times with large images. Long pulls mean Kubernetes pods wait to spin up, serverless functions suffer delays, and local development grinds to a frustrating halt. When there's nothing left to remove from an image, what more can you do to speed it up?

One thing you could try is an alternative compression algorithm. We recently compared the default gzip compression against zstd and found this simple change led to 60% faster decompression. But even with zstd, there is little we can do to avoid the bottleneck of pulling the entire container image before we can start the container.

eStargz is a container image format that builds on top of gzip, allowing for lazy loading of individual files while maintaining compatibility with standard container runtimes.

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