Caching your largest container image in the AMI sounds like an easy win. But on EBS, it might not work.

Jan Ludvik discovered that EBS lazy loading can silently undo image caching. The data isn't actually on disk when the node boots. Instead, it's loaded on demand from snapshots. So even though the image was "cached," the pod still had to pull it.

His workaround: cache the smaller daemon set images (kube-proxy, vpc-cni, node-local-dns) instead. That cut the pod startup by 10 seconds.



Watch the full episode: https://ku.bz/B7TzKXyxf