[raffraffraff]

There are very unsexy ways to reduce pull behaviour. In a previous life I built a CI/CD pipeline for an AI company and some of the container images were huge (ie GBs) so I did a lot of work on image caching. Mainly breaking up large containers into layers, starting with large layers with longer shelf-life, and incrementally adding faster-changing or smaller layers on top. Any time a large layer changed, it would trigger a packer rebuild for the CI runner AMI. The AMI also contained a start-up service that discovered and refreshed base images at boot time so they would (hopefully) never delay a real CI job. The natural scale up/down and max lifetime of the runner pool guaranteed that we never had an old AMI in use. It's likely that most people wouldn't bother with that level of optimization (or even host their own runners) but we need it.