Provisioning images to deploy containerized workloads in a virtualized environment

A non-transitory, machine-readable medium having instructions stored thereon which, when executed by a processor of a host computer of a plurality of host computers in a virtualized computing environment, cause the processor to:

• bring up a containerized workload in a virtual computing instance (VCI) executing in the host computer responsive to receiving a request to run the containerized workload in the virtualized computing environment, wherein bringing up the containerized workload includes:
• creating, upon authenticating with an image registry, a virtual machine disk (VMDK) that includes references to layers of a container image, the referenced layers of the container image being stored externally from the VMDK in shared storage accessible to the plurality of host computers of the virtualized computing environment;
• attaching, to the VCI, the VMDK having the references to the layers of the container image stored externally from the VMDK;
• mounting, in the VCI, a filesystem derived from the layers of the container image and exposed via the attached VMDK, to enable on-demand access to files of the container image stored externally from the VMDK;
• and
• responsive to a request made by a container for the containerized workload running in the VCI, for a file of the container image referenced by the mounted filesystem, retrieving the file from the shared storage,;
• and bringing up the containerized workload then accessing the retrieved file via the mounted filesystem-using the file.

A host computer of a virtualized computing environment, the host computer being configured to:

• bring up a containerized workload in a virtual computing instance (VCI) executing in the host computer responsive to receiving a request to run the containerized workload in the virtualized computing environment, wherein bringing up the containerized workload includes:
• creating, upon authenticating with an image registry, a virtual machine disk (VMDK) that includes references to layers of a container image, the referenced layers of the container image being stored externally from the VMDK in shared storage accessible to a plurality of host computers of the virtualized computing environment;
• attaching, to the VCI, the VMDK having the references to the layers of the container image stored externally from the VMDK;
• mounting, in the VCI, a filesystem derived from the layers of the container image and exposed via the attached VMDK, to enable on-demand access to files of the container image stored externally from the VMDK;
• and
• responsive to a request made by a container for the containerized workload running in the VCI, for a file of the container image referenced by the mounted filesystem, retrieving the file from the shared storage, containerized workload then accessing the retrieved file via the mounted filesystem.