[Enhancement]: Reduce size

[pauldraper]

Description

This plugin is 383 MB. (Linux)

That's huge.

Can it be smaller?

Affected Resource(s) and/or Data Source(s)

No response

Potential Terraform Configuration

No response

References

No response

Would you like to implement a fix?

None

[github-actions]

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[mattburgess]

I've just run bloaty to try and analyse where the size is coming from. The largest culprit appears to be this:

   FILE SIZE        VM SIZE    
 --------------  -------------- 
  13.5%   104Mi  30.9%   104Mi    [section .gopclntab]

Alas, according to golang/go#36313 there's not much we can do about that directly; that section is needed for certain tools/library calls to work. However, indirectly there might be a way we could decrease the binary size.

   FILE SIZE        VM SIZE    
 --------------  -------------- 
  13.5%   104Mi  30.9%   104Mi    [section .gopclntab]
   4.3%  33.3Mi   3.6%  12.1Mi    github.com/aws/aws-sdk-go-v2/service/ec2
...
   1.8%  13.9Mi   1.2%  4.00Mi    github.com/aws/aws-sdk-go/service/ec2

You'll see there that for the ec2 service there are some parts of the provider using the v1 SDK and others are using the v2 SDK. If we could convert all callers over to the newer SDK we could potentially eliminate 14Mi of binary size. Not massive, in and of itself, but if we repeat that over the various services that are only partially converted over to the newer SDK then we could shave quite some size off. It would also reduce the size of the above mentioned .gopclntab section as the symbols, etc. from that old SDK won't end up in there either.

Unfortunately, that migration work is sizeable & boring (adds no new features in and of itself) so is unlikely to be tackled with any particular fervour I wouldn't have thought. I don't work for or represent Hashicorp though so am only basing that assumption on how I'd prioritize things if I was maintaining a project with issue and PR lists of this project's size. There's also this note from the Contributor Guide:

At present, we are slowly increasing our footprint on SDK v2, but are not actively migrating existing code to use v2. The choice of SDK will be as follows:

For new services, you should use AWS SDK for Go v2. AWS has a migration guide that details the differences between the versions of the SDK.

For existing services, use the version of the SDK that service currently uses. You can determine this by looking at the import section in the service's Go files.

If anyone wants to reproduce my findings or investigate in any more depth I had to have a number of attempts to get the analysis to work:

# Running bloaty on a release binary fails because it's stripped:
$ bloaty -d compileunits -n 0 ~/go/bin/terraform-provider-aws 
bloaty: missing debug info

# Running bloaty on a 'standard' `go install` build fails, presumably due to a bug in bloaty's DWARF parsing?
$ go install
$ bloaty -d compileunits -n 0 ~/go/bin/terraform-provider-aws 
bloaty: premature EOF reading fixed-length DWARF data

# Not compressing the DWARF data got things working
$ go install -ldflags=-compressdwarf=false
$ bloaty -d compileunits -n 0 ~/go/bin/terraform-provider-aws 

   FILE SIZE        VM SIZE    
 --------------  -------------- 
...

[pauldraper]

Thanks for looking at this!

I've looked too, and the builds are indeed using the low-handing fruit of stripping the binary (-s -w).

I don't think there is anything actionable, but I thought I'd see if anyone had ideas.

[mattburgess]

@pauldraper it's been a while since I looked at this. The AWS migration to SDKv2 has been progressing well, spurred on by AWS' announcement that SDKv1 is going to be out of support soon. However, it doesn't appear to have had much effect on the size of the plugin; that's likely down to the fact that as much space as we might have saved by converting over to the newer SDK, support for new services/resources has pulled in their SDKs which have eaten up more space.

As it stands, on a stripped binary from main today we see:

$ ls -lh ~/go/bin/terraform-provider-aws
-rwxr-xr-x. 1 mattburgess mattburgess 512M Jul 30 00:40 /home/mattburgess/go/bin/terraform-provider-aws

One option that you might want to look at is the new(ish) awscc provider. This uses the CloudControl API (alone) to create all resource types hence only needs to pull in only a single AWS service SDK. As such, it's much smaller and is likely to not increase massively with new services/resources added:

$ ls -lh ~/go/bin/terraform-provider-awscc
-rwxr-xr-x. 1 mattburgess mattburgess 63M Jul 30 00:40 /home/mattburgess/go/bin/terraform-provider-awscc

It might not be feasible to migrate existing codebases over, depending on their size. But it might be worth looking at for greenfield projects/components.

[bryantbiggs]

This uses the CloudControl API (alone) to create all resource types hence only needs to pull in only a single AWS service SDK. As such, it's much smaller and is likely to not increase massively with new services/resources added:

Unless all of the functionality provided by the aws provider is migrated over to the awscc - in reality, awscc users will have to use both the aws and awscc providers. Which means, there will be a higher storage penalty, not lower