AWS announces SOCI-indexed images for faster SageMaker AI job starts

AWS introduces Seekable OCI (SOCI) indexing for Amazon SageMaker AI Training and Processing jobs to reduce container image download overhead. With SOCI indexing, SageMaker AI lazy-loads container images, fetching only the files needed to start the container immediately and streaming the rest in the background as code runs. This allows jobs to begin in seconds rather than minutes. Users can adopt the feature by using pre-indexed AWS Deep Learning Containers or by adding an index to their own images, requiring no changes to job definitions. Benchmarks show this reduces GPU idle time during image pulls by up to 90 percent.