[Feature Request] Release Azure CLI as ZIP packages

[jiasli]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

Currently Azure CLI on Windows is released as an MSI package. This has several problems:

• The MSI requires admin permission (Unable to install Azure CLI on Windows without admin access to machine #15381), which makes it impossible to install Azure CLI as a normal user.
• The installation location is fixed to C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\Azure\CLI2, making it impossible to customize the installation location.
• ZIP allows installing multiple versions side-by-side
• Some corporate firewall/policy may block downloading .exe, .msi (The AZ UPGRADE command fails because of corporate Firewall restrictions #22447)
• Updating with MSI is slow and takes several minutes.

Describe the solution you'd like

We could release Azure CLI as a portable ZIP packages, like PowerShell releases its ZIP packages at https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell/releases.

Additional context

As there is no official way to sign a ZIP, we can only use SHA256 to compute the hash of the ZIP and publish the hash along with the ZIP, but there is no way to sign it with Microsoft certificate.

[yonzhan]

ZIP solution

[l3ender]

Just curious if this has been prioritized in the backlog? It would greatly ease the onboarding pain for organizational users which often have limited access to their environment. Thanks!

[l3ender]

Hello--is there any update on this issue?