Improve install speed

[brancz]

TL;DR

Installing gcloud (and gke-gcloud-auth-plugin) adds about 1 minute to every single one of our CI jobs.

Could this be done faster somehow? 1 minute seems rather excessive, or is there a way to skip installing gcloud altogether maybe (it appears to be taking the majority of the time)? The only thing we use gcloud for is to retrieve the kubeconfig with gcloud container clusters get-credentials "$GKE_CLUSTER" --zone "$GKE_ZONE" (we use Workload Identity Federation, so maybe we can just synthesize the kubeconfig?)

Detailed design

No response

Additional information

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[brancz]

Apologies for opening this issue, I think I just found the answer myself. I was looking for the combination of:

• https://github.com/google-github-actions/get-gke-credentials
• https://github.com/simenandre/setup-gke-gcloud-auth-plugin

Which only generates the kubeconfig and installs the auth plugin, skipping gcloud all together.