How to speed up container instantiation - if possible at all?

It has to read a whole bunch of code to be ready to serve it. Have you ever booted your phone, a computer, or a modern television? It takes some time. It’s exactly like that. The container has a whole OS in it.

Yes. It’s separating the rails+nginx into its own container and having postgres and redis in another container (or however you want to provide redis and postgres).