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

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