ci: parallelize e2e job to speed it up

[Iam-Karan-Suresh]

Closes: #1522

Summary

Refactor the e2e GitHub Actions workflow by splitting the large monolithic job into five smaller, focused jobs that can run in parallel.

Changes

• Add a dedicated test job for unit tests and static analysis.

• Split e2e tests into:

  • test
  • e2e-smoke
  • e2e-ssa
  • e2e-lifecycle
  • e2e-advanced

• Group related test scenarios into dedicated jobs for better organization.

• Reduce overall CI execution time through parallelization.

This change improves workflow maintainability and helps speed up CI runs.

Hi @matheuscscp . Happy to refactor based on your suggestions 🙏

[stefanprodan]

GitHub now supports parallel steps, so instead of wasting time rebuilding the container in different jobs, we can just split the test inside the same workflow: https://github.blog/changelog/2026-06-25-actions-steps-can-now-be-run-in-parallel/

[Iam-Karan-Suresh]

GitHub now supports parallel steps, so instead of wasting time rebuilding the container in different jobs, we can just split the test inside the same workflow: https://github.blog/changelog/2026-06-25-actions-steps-can-now-be-run-in-parallel/

hi @stefanprodan @matheuscscp Updated the pr and happy to iterate based on your suggestions 🙏

[matheuscscp]

@Iam-Karan-Suresh Please rebase and force-push 🙏

[Iam-Karan-Suresh]

@matheuscscp rebased and push the changes

[matheuscscp]

LGTM! 🚀

Thanks very much @Iam-Karan-Suresh!

[fluxcdbot]

Successfully created backport PR for release/v1.6.x:

• [release/v1.6.x] ci: parallelize e2e job to speed it up #1543