etash2901 at the Knoldus blog walks us through the way Docker caches images:
If the objects on the file system that Docker is about to produce have not changed between builds, reusing a cache of a previous build on the host is a great time-saver. It makes building a new container really, really fast. None of those file structures have to be created and written to disk this time — the reference to them is sufficient to locate and reuse the previously built structures.
This is an order of magnitude faster than a a fresh build. If you’re building many containers, this reduced build-time means getting that container into production costs less, as measured by compute time.
Click through for some advice on how to minimize the amount of time you spend waiting for image layers to download or process.