Lightweight headless CI distribution (no MCP, LSP, interactive UI)

[sajeetharan]

Feedback source

External user feedback (travel multi-agent workshop team).

Problem

The current single-binary distribution bundles everything: interactive shell, MCP server, LSP, brokered auth, OpenTelemetry, ARM management. For CI/CD use cases (data seeding, CRUD, queries, integration test validation), most of this is unnecessary weight and attack surface.

Proposed solution

Ship a separate lightweight, headless CI distribution with:

• Predictable exit codes (stable contract)
• JSON output mode (--output json)
• Workload-identity authentication (federated credentials, no interactive browser)
• Core commands: import, query, assert, CRUD
• No MCP, LSP, brokered authentication, or interactive UI

Implementation options (in priority order)

1. Same .NET codebase with trimming/Native AOT — feature-flag the build to exclude MCP/LSP/interactive modules, use .NET publish trimming or NativeAOT for a smaller binary
2. Go or Rust reimplementation of the CI-only subset — smallest possible binary, no runtime dependency

Splitting the feature set is more important than changing languages.

Relationship to other issues

• Complements A1. Non-interactive output contract (NDJSON / --output json / stable exit codes) #155 (A1 — non-interactive output contract)
• Addresses size concern in Package size (50-60 MB compressed / ~200 MB installed) is friction for ephemeral CI/CD runners #174
• Pairs with CI/CD documentation (#TBD)

Acceptance criteria

• CI distribution is < 15 MB compressed
• Supports workload-identity auth (OIDC federated credentials)
• Stable exit-code contract documented
• JSON output for all commands
• No dependency on interactive terminal or browser

[mkrueger]

PR #201's cosmosdbshell-lite RPM satisfies the practical goal of this issue without requiring a separate headless rewrite or further feature removal.

Measured framework-dependent publish payloads:

• linux-x64: 9,063,414 bytes compressed (8.64 MiB)
• linux-arm64: 9,063,483 bytes compressed (8.64 MiB)

Both are comfortably below the issue's 15 MB compressed acceptance criterion, and even below 10 MB. The lite build excludes MCP, LSP, and brokered Visual Studio Code authentication while retaining the existing stable exit-code contract, structured JSON machine mode, workload-identity support, and core import/query/CRUD functionality.

Because the size target is already met with the shared .NET codebase, I don't see a need to remove the interactive shell or create a separate Go/Rust/headless implementation purely for footprint reduction. The retained interactive functionality is useful for the Azure Linux / Cloud Shell RPM scenario and does not prevent non-interactive CI usage via -c, piped scripts, and --output json.