1) Are there any ways to do this in a performant manner? Afaik, since the tarball is still sequential with no way to jump around, interacting with this filesystem would be fairly slow right?

2) Agreed, still need to look more into this, although it's more involved and entails changing more of our pipeline for packaging and distributing these images.

3) I need to look into how this would handle files that haven't been downloaded yet. From what I know about httpfs filesystems, I'm not sure how much would need to be done to let this block until file needed is downloaded vs the normal behavior of calling out to get the file being requested.

5) Could you go into more detail here? Not sure I understand how file boundaries, etc can help with latency/bandwidth.