Reduce the footprint of the `cilium-agent` image

Is your proposed feature related to a problem?

The cilium-agent is currently based on an ubuntu userspace and carries some amount of utils and packages that are not strictly needed in such an image. The goal of this issue is to act as an umbrella to track and orchestrate the various efforts that aim to shrink and slim down the cilium-agent image.

Why we want to do this: this reduces the attack surface, CVE scanners noise and a smaller image improves pull-time performance.

Note: swapping the base of the cilium-agent image to a FROM scratch or a distroless base is not a goal of this issue. Rather this issue is a first step in enabling such a potential change in the future.

Describe the feature you'd like

Relevant issues:

• #8760
• #8761
• #12879
• #27446
• #48811

Notify relevant community channels

No response

(Optional) Describe your proposed solution

No response