Client CLIs & SDKs for GCP, Firebase and other clouds are terribly bloated. GCP includes a python distro, firebase includes node+npm. This goes unnoticed on overpowered devboxes, but impacts your cloud bill with storage, vcpu, wall-time and transfer fees. If you are trying to downsize your VMs, you will find that the client SDK/ CLI pre-requisites will often hang your machine terminal by exausting vcpu and iops budgets. Cloud container services are often storage-limited to ram-disks--so CLI installs consume what little you have.
To combat the bloat, I've started a few projects to offer lightweight solutions
- gcloud-lite -- a stripped distro of gcloud cli that is 90% smaller
- gcloud-go -- a 90% smaller and faster go binary for deploying to firebase and gcloud
Benchmarks
For example, e2-medium VMs using gcloud-lite are 86% faster to install the cli. This means your work can start nearly 90s faster than using the default CLI. You can downsize to x-small VMs which can save up to 75%
| Image | Install Time | Improvement |
|---|---|---|
| google-cloud-cli | 1m29s | - |
| gcloud-lite | 12.6s | 86% |
For firebase deployments, the image is 92% smaller, and startup is faster, meaning you can downsize VMs and container jobs will execute > 50% faster
| docker image | size | savings |
|---|---|---|
| firebase-tools | 245mb | n/a |
| gcloud-go | 19mb | 92% |
Reduced Storage
- Runnable docker image — 93% smaller
- tgz tarball — 75% smaller
How You Can Help
Please start testing the projects, and file a feature request. Patches are welcome , and please share how the lightweight CLI tools are helping your project
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