Pulling Docker images can take a significant time in a workflow run, even when using cimg convenience images. Lazy pulling is a technology to allow containers to run without pulling the image completely, necessary chunks are instead fetched on-demand. This technology is made possible by the eStargz container image format, today it is supported by most container runtimes, for example: containerd, Podman, CRI-O, Buildkit (Moby) CircleCI should support lazy image pulling of eStargz images to improve container startup speed. See: https://github.com/containerd/stargz-snapshotter