azure/login pre step takes up to 1 minute to execute

[olafurnielsen]

Observed behavior:
The pre step in azure/login takes up to 1 minute to execute. Very seldom does it take a few seconds to execute. In some of our builds this accounts for half the total build time.

Expected behavior:
The step should consistently execute in a few seconds.

Information:

• azure/login@v2
• Authenticating against Azure public cloud
• Using OIDC credentials
• Running on GitHub hosted runners

Used as:

- name: Login to Azure
  uses: azure/login@v2
  with:
    tenant-id: ${{ secrets.AZURE_TENANT_ID }}
    client-id: ${{ secrets.AZURE_CLIENT_ID }}
    subscription-id: ${{ secrets.AZURE_SUBSCRIPTION_ID }}

Resulting in:

What can be done to speed this up?

[damianh]

This step is consuming 10 to 15 percent of our GitHub Actions build minutes and is costing us money. This should be fixed as a high priority please.

[YanaXu]

Hi @olafurnielsen and @damianh, we've released a new version v2.2.0. In this version, we removed the pre step and add 2 env variables to enable/disable pre or post cleanup.
v2 is aligned with v2.2.0 now.
Please try the new version. You can also refer to Enable/Disable the cleanup steps.

Just FYI, the time cost is mainly for login context initialization. After we remove pre step, the main step may need more time.

[GoncaloPT]

Hi @YanaXu

I've been trying the mentioned version, with both AZURE_LOGIN_PRE_CLEANUP and AZURE_LOGIN_POST_CLEANUP set to false and i'm having an average of 1 minute for the login action.

EDIT: Can we use a composite action to cache the login so it doesn't have to be redone every time?

[YanaXu]

Hi @GoncaloPT , could you help me check these questions?

• Do you use GitHub-hosted runner or Self-hosted runner? What's the OS type of your runner?
• When you mention "composite action", do you mean you have several workflows to run or several jobs to run or else? FYI, the login context can only be cached on the same runner.

The login time cost depends on underlying Azure CLI and Azure PowerShell. They needs time to init the login context.
However, our daily test on GitHub-hosted runners (utuntu & windows & MacOS) shows the time cost is less than yours (including both Azure CLI login and Azure PowerShell login).
Take the time cost yesterday for example. There are 18 logins and the max one is 51 seconds, the min one is 10 seconds and the average is 23 seconds.

[GoncaloPT]

Hi @YanaXu, thanks for your reply.

Replying to your questions:

• We do use self-hosted runners, which are provided on our enterprise github instance. They run ubuntu.
• My idea would be to optimize the best I can.. For instance, imagine that I provide a composite action that fetchs secrets from key vault; If I could cache that login for posterior invocations of that same action it would improve the time consumed... To make It useful, it would have to keep that "state" through different workflows.

Regarding the time cost you present, I haven't been able to reproduce logins near those ones values.. The full roundtrip of login + fetch one secret from key vault took from 1m:13s up to 1:50s.