Reduce size of installed CLI

[akloss-cibo]

Describe the feature

The bulk of the CLI is uncompressed data from botocore. Per boto/botocore#3485 (comment), it seems that more recent botocore implementations compress this data. It would be nice for the SDK to also compress this data. It's not clear to me why there's a botocore fork either, but that's not really my concern.

Use Case

The AWS CLI tends to be installed lots of places, including in docker images where it will tend to be copied/downloaded repeatedly. Having it be significantly smaller would result in cost savings for those who use it.

Proposed Solution

Consider using botocore's compressed implementation or another compression solution.

Other Information

Comparison of the expanded data vs zip compression:

% zip -9 -r -p -q data.zip data
% du -h -s data.zip data
12M	    /tmp/data.zip
103M	data
%

Acknowledgements

• I may be able to implement this feature request
• This feature might incur a breaking change

CLI version used

aws-cli/2.32.30 Python/3.13.11 Linux/6.14.0-1018-aws exe/x86_64.ubuntu.24

Environment details (OS name and version, etc.)

Ubuntu 24.04

[ashovlin]

Hey @akloss-cibo, double-checking, you're interested in the size of the CLI once it's installed, as opposed to the installers themselves?

[akloss-cibo]

Hey @akloss-cibo, double-checking, you're interested in the size of the CLI once it's installed, as opposed to the installers themselves?

Yes; I get that it isn't that much data, but especially with poor caching inside ECR, it's not a close to $0 as it could be.

[RyanFitzSimmonsAK]

Hi @akloss-cibo, thanks for reaching out. Improving performance of the AWS CLI is planned in the near future, and installation size is a part of that. I can't guarantee this specific optimization will be included, but we are definitely aware that users want the CLI to be smaller, and are going to take a look at that.

[akloss-cibo]

Oh, this is probably semi-obvious, but if there isn't a way to avoid installing examples and other non-essential components, there should be. Right now I'm just rm -rf /usr/local/aws-cli/v2/*/dist/awscli/examplesing after installing.