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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. View the full article

About a year ago, we published a post on how to Optimize your Spring Boot application for AWS Fargate, where we went into different optimization techniques to speed up the startup time of Spring Boot applications for AWS Fargate. We started the post with “Fast startup times are key to quickly react to disruptions and demand peaks, and they can increase the resource efficiency”. Seekable OCI (SOCI) is a new and simple way to reduce startup times for Java workloads running on AWS Fargate. It can be combined with the earlier optimizations, or you could just use SOCI for a simple win. Customers running applications on Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) with AWS Fargate can now use SOCI to lazily start or in other words: start without waiting for the entire container image to be downloaded. SOCI starts your application immediately and downloads data from the container registry when requested by the application. This improves the overall container startup time. A great deep dive about SOCI and AWS Fargate can be found here. In this post, we’ll dive into techniques to optimize your Java applications using SOCI that don’t require you to change a single line of Java code. In our Spring Boot example application, this improves application startup time by about 25%, and this improvement should get bigger as the container image size gets larger. In addition, we’ll also take a closer look at benchmarks for two different frameworks and approaches. You don’t have to rebuild your images to use SOCI. However, during our tests we also identified optimizations for Java applications only require small modifications to the build process and Dockerfile (i.e., the actual application doesn’t need any adjustments) and reduce the startup time of an AWS Fargate task even further. While we’re focused on Java applications today, we expect SOCI to be helpful for any cases where customers deploy large container images. This testing was carried out with a sample application and the layered jar with SOCI approach may not improve launch times for all Spring Boot applications. We recommended testing this approach with your application and measuring the impact in your environment... View the full article