Slim version of the cilium-cli image

[marcofranssen]

Proposal / RFE

Is your feature request related to a problem?

The quay.io/cilium/cilium-cli-ci:latest image is quite large (2.23GB). We use this image in a k8s Job to bootstrap the CNI on our fresh clusters. Due to the large image size it takes several minutes in EKS environments to have the image pulled in at our fargate Node that is used to bootstrap the CNI for our karpenter managed nodes.

Trying to speed up our bootstrapping time, we also use image pull-through cache in ECR, so the image is in the same region as our cluster, but this barely improves the image pull speed.

Describe the solution you'd like

Having a slim image (e.g. busybox/alpine/scratch/distroless) would reduce the image pull time drastically which would speed up our cluster bootstrapping. Several MB compared to 2.23GB.

Futhermore it would be great if the image tagging strategy would include some version tagging, so it is easy to pick a specific cilium version and choose the distro variant of the image (slim/distroless, whatever we decide to make available).

Note

If feature request is accepted, happy to take a stab at adding a Dockerfile/updating the existing image (depending on what we choose as a solution direction). I would also need to understand why some of the dependencies are in the current image like the google sdk and such. (could we leave those out for proper functioning, or could we make cloud provider specific images).

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[marcofranssen]

There are 2 PRs to finalize this.

#2842
#2782

[michi-covalent]

let's take care of this before the december release cc @tklauser