On the 17th of July, Broadcom Tanzu Divison, the owner of Bitnami since VMware 2023 aquisition, announced it's introduction of Bitnami Secure Images (BSI) - continuously built images that are updated within hours of upstream patches and a more transparent view of their true security posture.
This shift comes with limiting the use of Bitnami free community container images, paid subscription to BSI and leaving Tech Stack deciders with two options. Pay now or roll up your sleeves and migrate.
Critical changes:
- Bitnami is moving away from freely available images under the Docker Hub username bitnami. Instead, images will be split into two main categories:
- docker.io/bitnamisecure: This repository lists the free, hardened community images (latest-only). The full commercial catalog is delivered via private registries with a Bitnami Secure Images subscription.
- docker.io/bitnamilegacy: Existing container images, including older or versioned tags, will be moved to this legacy repository. Use only for temporary migration purposes as it's future presence is not guaranteed.
- Main docker.io/bitnami Repository: After August 28th, the main Bitnami Docker Hub repository will only contain the limited community-tier subset of hardened images, exclusively with "latest" tags.
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Bitnami Helm Charts: While the open-source code for Helm charts on GitHub will continue to be maintained under the Apache 2 license, the already packaged OCI Helm charts at docker.io/bitnamicharts will stop receiving updates.
- End of Version Pinning for Free Users: Only "latest" tags will be supported (or the unsupported legacy repo). You will not be able to pull up to date versioned images going forward.
Conclusions:
While Broadcom and Bitnami are starting to focus exclusively on high income Enterprise customers, start-ups, small to large companies will need to adapt and position themselves in a way that future suply chain changes will not impact them. Keeping techical dependencies under control and resiliece will probably be the focus of many stakeholders in the near future.</span>
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