Vercel adds regional image caching to speed Sandbox startup

Vercel says Sandbox now initializes up to 4x faster outside its Washington, D.C. region when reused image data comes from a regional cache. Reading cached data near the sandbox avoids requests to origin image storage in Washington on cache hits. The caching supports managed and custom images backed by Vercel Container Registry, including snapshots based on those images. In internal benchmarks using Vercel Managed Images, startup time fell about 75% in Paris and from about 3.5s to 1.05s in Seoul. Regions closer to origin storage generally see smaller gains.