# Project Purpose

This repo is about improving NiFi workflows in two related ways:

1. **Performance** — the current pack/unpack path (`MergeContent` /
   `UnpackContent`) is disk-I/O bound on shared vSAN storage, due to
   redundant read/write passes: an ingest write, a separate read to hash
   content, a read+write to merge/pack, a read+write to unpack. vSAN is
   shared, virtualized IOPS across the vSphere cluster, so the pain is
   *contention*, not any single slow disk.
2. **Integrity & non-repudiation** — FlowFiles packed and exported outside
   NiFi's space need signed attributes (the attributes already carry a
   content hash, so content isn't re-hashed at pack time) to prove both
   integrity and authorship, for S3 storage/retrieval, HTTP/filesystem
   delivery, and selective date/category replay from a catalog database.

A future requirement extends this to TB-scale files that must be chunked,
tracked, and transited through NiFi (for routing/content-assurance
controls — all content must pass through NiFi) — including across a
one-way network boundary (MR) with no return channel for retransmission.

See [[topology]] and [[packaging-signing-decisions]].