My take from all this is that OCI, being essentially a .tar.gz, is a bad image format. A smarter solution would either use a seekable archive format like zip, o

My take from all this is that OCI, being essentially a .tar.gz, is a bad image format. A smarter solution would either use a seekable archive format like zip, or profile the container startup to make a list of essential files, and put those at the beginning of the image where they would be unconditionally fetched. Also, a fully lazy fetch is bad for reliability: the image should slowly be slowly fetched in its entirety, after which restarts only work with local data.