Bitnami Helm Charts Changing on August 28, 2025

[tada5hi]

Bitnami has announced that it will be making extensive changes to its public container image catalog from August 28, 2025. This change also affects our previous usage habits.
Here are the key points and what they mean for us:

What's changing?

• Introduction of Bitnami Secure Images:
  Bitnami will offer a new line of hardened, security-optimized container images (“Secure Images”). These images have smaller attack surfaces, contain CVE transparency, SBOMs and offer optional enterprise support.

• Discontinuation of non-hardened, Debian-based images:
  The classic, non-hardened images (e.g. bitnami/mysql:10.6) will no longer be updated and removed from the public Docker Hub (docker.io/bitnami).

• Migration of older images to “Bitnami Legacy”:
  Existing, versioned images (e.g. bitnami/postgresql:15.4.0) are moved to the new archive repository docker.io/bitnamilegacy. They will no longer receive updates or security fixes there.

• Free use restricted:
  In the free version, only “latest” tags of the secure images are still available - for development purposes only, not for productive workloads.

What does this mean for us?

• We should check whether we are using Bitnami containers, especially with fixed version tags.
  If so, a switch is necessary - either to the new Bitnami Secure Images (only latest in the free version), to alternatives (e.g. Alpine or officially maintained Docker images), or to a commercial solution with support.
• Applications in productive use should not be based on outdated or unmaintained images.

Next steps:

• Check your charts for the use of Bitnami images.

[tada5hi]

@okohlbacher said that we can buy a subscription license with project money. So this should be resolved.

[brucetony]

We will need to review the terms of the license that comes with the subscription, because I am not convinced this is a good long-term solution for node deployment. For the node, multiple locations will need to be able to download these restricted images from bitnami, but I assume that an API key comes with the subscription for us to use, but how do we allow others to use this? Do we get multiple keys, are we allowed to use this however we want? We could also download the secure bitnami image and then store it in our own registry, but does the license allow redistribution?