[HEALTH]: ChaosBlade Project

[angellk]

Project name

ChaosBlade

Project Issue Link

ChaosBlade Project Health Issue

Concern

In reviewing the project's application to move to Incubation level, the project appears to have decrease in activity that may put the project at risk of continuing in the CNCF.

Also, upon reviewing the project's communication channels:

• slack channel has been inactive for over 90 days
• twitter/X channel no longer exists
• gitter channel has been inactive since June, 2024

This should be investigated more thoroughly.

Prior engagement

No response

Additional Information

No response

[xcaspar]

Hi everyone. The ChaosBlade project has indeed slowed down its feature iteration in the past year, but we have not stopped maintaining the project. We previously communicated with the community based on the dingding group, and we will replace the existing community communication methods with issues, slack, etc. as soon as possible.
In addition, we are making some development plans based on AI chaos engineering, and it is estimated that there will be some progress by the end of this month.
Thank you for your investigation into ChaosBlade, we are now taking action to correct the above issues.

[kevin-wangzefeng]

Status update:

• I had a meeting with ChaosBlade project maintainers today to align on the TOC's current concerns and expectations regarding the project's health.
• The maintainers provided an update on the project's current status and the improvements they've made since the the project health issue was raised. Basic activities (commits, issues, PRs) have been improved, and hopefully there will be a new release this month.
• Due to preference of their community tooling, there's a challenge of transparency -- some of the project's daily activities (e.g. Q&A and discussions in dingtalk) can't be easily observed. They plan to fix this as soon as possible.

Action item:

• @xcaspar to provide a detailed update on the improvements and progress that ChaosBlade has already made, as well as future plans. It would be an important input for the TOC's decision-making and how we can move forward.

[xcaspar]

Thank you very much to @kevin-wangzefeng for his guidance and everyone for discussing the project. Our recent progress and future plans are listed below. We will also update this issue with further progress. Thank you for your attention.

Recent Progress of the ChaosBlade Project

1. Project Engineering Governance

1.1 Improve project compilation

Because ChaosBlade involves multiple languages, platforms, and projects, compilation and packaging have long been a pain point, a significant factor in slowing down new version releases. This time, we spent a significant amount of time optimizing compilation and packaging to achieve unified and convenient compilation and packaging.
Take the ChaosBlade main project as an example:

The package format now uses the make OS_ARCH command, such as make linux_arm64 . The MODULES parameter can also be flexibly added to package required sub-projects (fault injection capabilities). Compilation and packaging documentation has also been improved to lower the barrier to entry for developers.

Related PRs: chaosblade-io/chaosblade#1128

To meet this compilation function, all sub-projects need to be modified as follows:
chaosblade-exec-cplus: chaosblade-io/chaosblade-exec-cplus#18
chaosblade-exec-os: chaosblade-io/chaosblade-exec-os#182
chaosblade-exec-cloud: chaosblade-io/chaosblade-exec-cloud#15
chaosblade-exec-middleware: chaosblade-io/chaosblade-exec-middleware#19
chaosblade-operator: chaosblade-io/chaosblade-operator#259

1.2 Improving the CI/CD Process

Complete the Github Actions workflow for each project and verify the quality of PRs.

2. New features of the project

• chaosblade-box adds stress testing management, related branches:https://github.com/chaosblade-io/chaosblade-box/tree/iscas-zmz
• chaosblade-exec-jvm adds support for JDK17+:Support jdk17+ and change the build target version from jdk6 to jdk8. chaosblade-io/chaosblade-exec-jvm#343
• Added Java-specific exception information injection:fix: support specifying message in throwDeclaredException chaosblade-io/chaosblade-exec-jvm#344
• Added the chaosblade-space-exploration project to support observable data access and fault space awareness (released at the end of September):https://github.com/chaosblade-io/chaosblade-space-exploration/tree/iscas-zmz

There is also PR processing:

• fix /login refresh error chaosblade-io/chaosblade-box#185
• fix: calculating the file size chaosblade-io/chaosblade-exec-os#175
• ...

3. Community Q&A & Issue Handling
   Handled many issues

Currently, most Q&A sessions are conducted in DingTalk groups, which have 3,200 members and answer questions almost every day.

4. Subsequent Planning

4.1 Milestones

• September 2025: Release Golang application fault injection and fault space detection;
• October 2025: Supplement atomic capabilities and fix legacy issues;
• November 2025: ChaosBlade MCP Server released.
• December 2025: Release of Python application fault injection capabilities
• February 2026: ChaosBlade 2.x released, with AI Agent capabilities

4.2 Release Rhythm

2025-09-11 Release v1.7.5, and subsequent versions will be released every month;

4.3 Community Governance

• The Ding group will continue to operate, but if it involves scenario problems, defects, or new requirements, users will be guided to submit issues.
• All sub-project issues are directed to the ChaosBlade main project for submission, facilitating unified management.
• Standardize issue labels and actively respond to and resolve issues.
• A community meeting is held every month to synchronize project progress and discuss new proposals.
• Publish at least one article every month to describe the latest features of the project.
• End users are encouraged to participate in project contributions and community-related items are distributed as rewards to actively participating contributors.

[xcaspar]

We've released version 1.7.5, addressing over 40 issues and featuring 11 contributors. For details, see: https://github.com/chaosblade-io/chaosblade/releases/tag/v1.7.5

You'll also notice that our latest version 1.7.5 uses GitHub Actions for releases, which will greatly improve our subsequent release efficiency. This has been configured for each major repository. For details, see:

• https://github.com/chaosblade-io/chaosblade-exec-jvm/releases/tag/v1.7.5
• https://github.com/chaosblade-io/chaosblade-exec-os/releases/tag/v1.7.5
• https://github.com/chaosblade-io/chaosblade-exec-cri/releases/tag/v1.7.5
• https://github.com/chaosblade-io/chaosblade-exec-middleware/releases/tag/v1.7.5
• https://github.com/chaosblade-io/chaosblade-exec-cloud/releases/tag/v1.7.5
• https://github.com/chaosblade-io/chaosblade-operator/releases/tag/v1.7.5
• https://github.com/chaosblade-io/chaosblade/releases/tag/v1.7.5

[kevin-wangzefeng]

Thanks @xcaspar for the update and for your efforts in revitalizing the community's momentum.

As discussed in today's TOC public meeting, I suggest we keep this issue open for the time being. This will give the ChaosBlade community an opportunity to demonstrate sustained activity and growth.

We can re-evaluate and consider resolving this issue once we see more consistent evidence of the project's healthy status.