Broadcom to discontinue free Bitnami Helm charts
40 comments
·July 18, 2025chuckadams
vibbix
The source of this great quote, from the wonderful Bryan Cantrell: https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc
remram
This announcement is a little hard to read. They make it seem that the current images under docker.io/bitnami/* get deleted on August 28? But individual chart READMEs seem to say that images will move during a period starting on August 28 and ending two weeks later? But looking at https://hub.docker.com/u/bitnamilegacy images have been copied already?
From ticket https://github.com/bitnami/charts/issues/35164:
> Now – August 28th, 2025: Plan your migration: Update CI/CD pipelines, Helm repos, and image references
> August 28th, 2025: Legacy assets are archived in the Bitnami Legacy repository.
From README https://github.com/bitnami/charts/blob/4973fd08dd7e95398ddcc...:
> Starting August 28th, over two weeks, all existing container images, including older or versioned tags (e.g., 2.50.0, 10.6), will be migrated from the public catalog (docker.io/bitnami) to the “Bitnami Legacy” repository (docker.io/bitnamilegacy), where they will no longer receive updates.
What are users expected to do exactly?
carrodher
The complete history of Bitnami container images has been copied to the "bitnamilegacy" repository. New tags will continue to be synced there until August 28th. After that date, "bitnamilegacy" will no longer receive updates, and images in the mainline "bitnami" repository will begin to be removed over a period that may take up to two weeks.
Once the cleanup is complete, the mainline "bitnami" repository on DockerHub will contain only a limited subset of Bitnami Secure Images (at this moment available at "bitnamisecure"). These are hardened, security-enhanced containers intended for development or trial use, providing a preview of the full feature set available in the paid offering.
- Bitnami: https://hub.docker.com/u/bitnami - Bitnami Legacy: https://hub.docker.com/u/bitnamilegacy - Bitnami Secure Images: https://hub.docker.com/u/bitnamisecure
ntqz
I could see the writing on the wall with this.
On that note, I'm already looking at migrating my codebase off of Spring. Just testing the waters with Quarkus, Helidon, Micronaut, Pekko, Vert.x, and plain Jakarta EE right now.
lapusta
Red Hat effectively killed their JBoss/Middleware team and the rest of it moved to IBM https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/evolving-our-middleware-strat... Quarkus and other tools were pushed to CommonHaus/Apache. I believe Vert.X was also mostly developer by RH team, although moved to Eclispe Foundation a decade ago.
Oracle also ended up somehow sponsoring 2 frameworks: Helidon & Micronaut.
I'd bet Spring is still the safest choice next to Jakarta EE standards that all are built on top of nowadays.
_1tan
Are there any indications or just a feel?
bags43
Company where I work had huge risk audit.
The second highest risk is using USA based cloud with 66/100.
The first one was using Spring Boot everywhere 77/100. Till the end of 2025 we need to have migration path to something else with 2 PoCs done.
jcrben
What was the actual risk of using SpringBoot tho?
jchmbrln
I’m completely out of the loop. What’s going on with Spring Boot?
dpkirchner
Maybe this will finally break me of my habit of using helm charts, period.
skissane
I’ve never used Helm charts. I learned K8S in a shop in which kustomize is the standard and helm is a permitted exception to the standard, but I just never felt any reason to learn helm. Am I missing out?
Sometimes the limitations of kustomize annoy me, but we find ways to live with them
ntqz
Grafana's Tanka is a very underappreciated tool if you have to do something similar to Helm.
cheshire_cat
Why do you want to stop using helm charts? Genuine question, as I'm new to Kubernetes and helm.
chuckadams
Write a few Helm charts and you'll understand why people want to stop using it. `nindent` will become a curse word in your vocabulary. It's a fine tool at the user level, but the DX is an atrocity.
cbzbc
What are you planning on moving to ?
bigstrat2003
I mean, I have written a few (like 5-10?) and I don't understand either. I find that Helm is quite a nice tool which does its job very well.
NewJazz
Consuming one that is well written isn't too much pain, IME. But writing or modifying one can be really annoying. Aiui the values.yaml has no type schema, just vibes. The whole thing is powered off using text templating with yaml (a whitespace sensitive language), which is error prone and often hard to read. That's basically the main issues in a nutshell, it may not sound like much, but helm doesn't exactly do a whole lot and it does that limited set of stuff poorly.
remram
I share your dislike of Helm, but FYI there are schemas for values, see for example https://github.com/bitnami/charts/blob/main/bitnami/postgres... and docs https://helm.sh/docs/topics/charts/#schema-files
zer00eyz
I will leave it to others: https://noyaml.com
sseveran
This is going to cause some disruptions. What are the alternatives out there to bitnami charts?
carrodher
The source code for Bitnami containers and Helm charts remains publicly available on GitHub and continues to be licensed under Apache 2.
What’s changing is that Bitnami will no longer publish the full catalog of container images to DockerHub. If you need any image, you can still build/package it yourself from the open-source GitHub repositories.
ethan_smith
Check out Artifact Hub, the CNCF-hosted charts from projects like Prometheus/Grafana, or the official k8s-at-home charts as solid alternatives to Bitnami.
gchamonlive
My first thought was Linuxcontainers but I think they just maintain docker images, not helm charts
chrisandchris
They're all open source - fork the repo and start collectively maintain them.
gchamonlive
That doesn't really answer the question, does it?
jahsome
You asked for an alternative and that seems like an alternative to me.
nodesocket
Fantastic, this will break a few of my deployments and environments. Mostly use the bitnami PostgreSQL chart.
While I’m sure would be a bit of effort, why not publish popular charts to GitHub packages (free) so people have an easy migration?
iotapi322
That's fine , their repmgr postgres repository was a joke.
remram
"Discontinuing this library of 120 things for everyone is fine, *I* didn't like *one of them* I won't say why"
js4ever
Great more enshitification! Broadcom is destroying everything they touch
jacquesm
That's nonsense. RPi would not exist if not for Broadcom.
okanat
RPi doesn't exist due to Broadcom. It exists despite Broadcom.
Using RPis can be a huge PITA, if you'd like to do something a bit more complex with the hardware. HDMI, the video decoders are all behind closed doors with blobs on top of blobs and NDAs.
RPi SoCs are some of the weirdest out there. It boots from the GPU ffs.
Broadcom gonna Broadcom. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower.