Fighting GCP & Firebase Cloud Client CLI and SDK Bloat

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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