Customers running applications with more than one containers on Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) with AWS Fargate can now leverage Seekable OCI (SOCI) to lazily load specific container images within the Amazon ECS task definition. This eliminates the need to generate SOCI indexes for smaller container images within the task definition, while still getting the benefits of SOCI with larger container images, improving the overall application deployment and scale-out time.

Until now, customers had to generate SOCI indexes of all the container images present in the task definition and push them to Amazon ECR. Starting today, customers can choose which container images they want lazily loaded by selectively generating SOCI indexes only for those images. This is beneficial for use-cases where customers run tasks that have a main application container and supporting sidecars which are considerably smaller in size. For such use-cases, customers only need to build a SOCI index for the larger application container image. AWS Fargate will intelligently lazily load the application container and eagerly download the other sidecars.

This feature is available in all regions where Amazon ECS, AWS Fargate, and Amazon ECR are available. To get started, visit the documentation.