Install time must be radically improved

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe. It isn’t reasonable in some cases to prebuild VM images with az cli installed. In those cases, when its needed an install must be on par if not better than installing terraform.

I have a github action that has these numbers;

 Install/Upgrade AZ CLI      4m 56s
    CONTAINER_NAME: intake
Run Start-Process msiexec.exe -Wait -ArgumentList '/I azure-cli-2.3.1.msi /quiet'
  Start-Process msiexec.exe -Wait -ArgumentList '/I azure-cli-2.3.1.msi /quiet'
  shell: C:\Program Files\PowerShell\7\pwsh.EXE -command ". '{0}'"

This is just the install as I had the installer checked in to my github repo.

Describe the solution you’d like A az cli install must be in the seconds range. (10-30 seconds). Frankly this should be a fast as a file copy.

[Petermarcu]

Here is a small change that will help a little. https://github.com/Azure/azure-cli/pull/16903

[jiasli]

I did some tests recently:

• On Windows 11 running on my Surface Book and Windows 10 running on my desktop PC, Azure CLI MSI (https://azcliprod.blob.core.windows.net/msi/azure-cli-2.34.1.msi) takes around 1m15s to install.

• On Ubuntu 20.04 running in WSL, Azure CLI DEB (https://packages.microsoft.com/repos/azure-cli/pool/main/a/azure-cli/azure-cli_2.34.1-1~focal_all.deb) takes around 30s to install.

• For MacOS, I don’t have a MacOS physical device at hand right now, but according to a test I made with Azure DevOps MacOS 1.15 agent, it take 2m30s: https://dev.azure.com/azure-sdk/playground/_releaseProgress?_a=release-environment-logs&releaseId=980&environmentId=1052

  2022-03-10T08:47:46.9799610Z brew install azure-cli –verbose
  2022-03-10T08:50:17.9113860Z az --version
  

The installation time is mainly due to the file number of Python SDK which includes lots of “duplicated” files for all API versions.

The overall file number of Azure CLI 2.34.1 is 15667 and 8594 files are from Python SDK (more than a half of totally file number).

Reducing Python SDK size (https://github.com/Azure/azure-sdk-for-python/issues/11149) will certainly improve the installation time of Azure CLI.