Eraser is an open source tool for cleaning up unused Kubernetes images in a cluster.

“When deploying to Kubernetes, it’s common for pipelines to build and push images to a cluster, but it’s much less common for these images to be cleaned up. This can lead to accumulating bloat on the disk, and a host of non-compliant images lingering on the nodes,” the project’s docs state. 

According to the Eraser maintainers its mechanism is different from Kubernetes’ native garbage collection because that typically only kicks in when disk usage reaches 85% and only runs until it is down to 80%.  

Eraser determines the current state of an image and deletes it if it discovers that it’s not currently running. 

The project is currently a Sandbox level project at the CNCF after being accepted into the organization in June 2023. It has 437 stars on GitHub