Bitnami Container Repository migration

Initial situation

Some time ago, Bitnami announced that it would be switching its public container repositories.

Bitnami is known for providing both Helm charts and container images for a wide range of applications. These include Helm Charts and container images for Keycloak, the RabbitMQ cluster operator, and many more. Many of these charts and images are used by companies, private individuals, and open source projects.

Currently, the images provided by Bitnami are based on Debian. In the future, the images will be based on specially hardened distroless images.

A timeline of the changes, including FAQs, can be found on GitHub.

What exactly is changing?

According to Bitnami, the current Dockerhub Repo Bitnami will be converted on August 28, 2025. All images available up to that point will only be available within the Bitnami Legacy Repositories from that date onwards.

Some of the new secure images are already available at bitnamisecure. However, without a subscription, only a very small subset of images will be provided. Currently, there are 343 different repositories under bitnami – but only 44 under bitnamisecure (as of 2025-08-19). In addition, the new Secure Images are only available in the free version under their digests. The only tag available, “latest,” always points to the most recently provided image. The version behind it is not immediately apparent.

Action Required?

If you use Helm charts from Bitnami with container images from the current repository, action is required. Currently used Bitnami Helm charts mostly reference the (still) current repository.

Depending on your environment, the effects of the change may not be noticeable until a later date. For example, when restarting a container or pod, if the cached version of the image has been cleaned up or the pod was started on a node that does not have direct access (cache) to the image. If a container proxy is used to obtain the images, this may happen even later.

Required adjustments

If you want to ensure that the images currently in use can continue to be obtained, you should switch to the Bitnami Legacy Repository. This is already possible.

Affected Helm charts can be patched with adjusted values files, for example.

Unfortunately, the adjustments mentioned above are only a quick fix. If you want to use secure and updated images in the long term, you will have to make the switch.
This may mean switching to an alternative Helm chart or container image, accepting the new conditions of the bitnamisecure repository, or paying for the convenience you have enjoyed so far.

What are the alternatives?

For companies that are not prepared to pay the new license fees, there are various alternatives:

• Build your own container images: Companies can create their own container images based on Dockerfiles and official base images.
• Open source alternatives: There are numerous open source projects that offer similar functionality to Bitnami. Examples include “Helm Hub” and “Artifact Hub”.
• Community charts: Many projects offer their own Helm charts, which are maintained by the community.

References

• https://news.broadcom.com/app-dev/broadcom-introduces-bitnami-secure-images-for-production-ready-containerized-applications
• https://github.com/bitnami/charts/issues/35164