[Sandbox] BLAFS

### Application contact email(s)

ahmed.aley@gmail.com, huaifengzhang@outlook.com

### Trademark and accounts

- [x] If the project is accepted, I agree to donate all project trademarks and accounts to the CNCF

### Contributing or sponsoring entity contact email(s)

ahmed.aley@gmail.com, huaifengzhang@outlook.com

### Project summary

A container debloating tool that works with complex workloads

### Project description

Most containers are bloated with unused files that inflate image sizes, increase provisioning times, and waste resources. Existing debloating tools are limited in scope and effectiveness, failing to address the widespread issue of container bloat at scale. BLAFS addresses bloat at the filesystem level by introducing a flexible debloating layer that preserves the layered structure of container filesystems. The debloating layer can be organized in different ways to meet diverse requirements including security hardening, enabled layered-sharing, and partial layer sharing.

### Org repo URL (provide if all repos under the org are in scope of the application)

N/A

### Project repo URL in scope of application

https://github.com/negativa-ai/BLAFS

### Additional repos in scope of the application

_No response_

### Website URL

https://github.com/negativa-ai/BLAFS

### Roadmap

https://github.com/negativa-ai/BLAFS/issues?q=is%3Aissue%20state%3Aopen%20type%3AFeature

### Roadmap context

We will be integrating BLAFS with multiple CI/CD platforms, supporting platforms such as Podman, and improving the deployability of the tool

### Contributing guide

https://github.com/negativa-ai/BLAFS/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md

### Code of Conduct (CoC)

https://github.com/negativa-ai/BLAFS/blob/main/CONDUCT.md

### Adopters

_No response_

### Maintainers file

https://github.com/negativa-ai/BLAFS/blob/main/MAINTAINERS.md

### Security policy file

https://github.com/negativa-ai/BLAFS/blob/main/SECURITY.md

### IP policy

- [x] If the project is accepted, I agree the project will follow the CNCF IP Policy

### Will the project require a license exception?

We are currently using MIT license, which we believe is in the allowlist. We are happy to switch to Apache 2.0, if necessary.

### Standard or specification?

N/A

### Why CNCF?

Our project was started as an academic research project. However, from talking to many people in different industries, we were told that this will be useful for their workloads, but they would like to see this as part of CNCF to be able to use it as it will mean there will hopefully be more maintainers than two academics. We would like to be able to create a community around the project, integrate it with as many CI/CD systems as we can, and make sure that the project remains open-sourced rather than, e.g., keeping it closed at a company.

### Benefit to the landscape

We have done a very thorough evaluation on exisiting deblaoting tools here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.04641
Basically, our tool is the only tool we know of capable of supporting very complex and large containers such as Machine Learning containers and able to support layer sharing. Our tool is also much more reliable than all other exisiting tools we know of.

### Cloud native 'fit'

BLAFS fits in the "Container Registry", "Automation & Configuration", and "Security & Compliance" landscape categories.

### Cloud native 'integration'

N/A

### Cloud native overlap

SlimToolKit: https://github.com/slimtoolkit/slim

### Similar projects

Cimplifier which is an academic project recently open-sourced also by us: https://github.com/negativa-ai/MMLB/tree/main/external/cimplifier

### Landscape

No

### Business Product or Service to Project separation

At the moment, this project is unrelated to any product or service.

### Project "Domain Technical Review"

_No response_

### CNCF contacts

_No response_

### Additional information

This project started as part of Huaifeng's PhD and has a full academic report with detailed evaluations: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.04641