Bitnami ARM containers available at Docker Hub

VMware’s Bitnami team has achieved another big step in moving further its commitment to the development ecosystem:

🎉🎉 Bitnami containers have support for ARM and they are available at Docker Hub! 🎉🎉

Our Catalog has more than 200 million monthly pulls of our containers just from Docker Hub (and growing), so we had to do this effort thinking about our users. On the other hand, the team did its best to support the current catalog but in some cases, for example MongoDB, wasn’t able because there are no ARM binaries available for Debian 11.

More than a year and a half ago (mid 2021), Bitnami users started requesting us to provide support for ARM because Apple started with their M1 and also in the Hyperscalers the ARM adoption was planned to be done. So, after analyzing the needed efforts and seeing how important this feature was for our end users, we proceed to implement this.

Hyperscalers in 2022 provided their customers ARM architecture support (Google Cloud, AWS, and Azure) and there is also a great article written by Percona’s team doing an economical comparison of using different EC2 types in AWS, in the end, we can see how in terms of costs, Graviton (EC2 with ARM support) is a good choice in terms of pricing vs performance for database usage.

From VMware’s Bitnami team, we are happy to face this challenge and keep our aim committed to our users’ needs. We will keep working, as usual, thinking about end users' needs and, for sure, being vigilant to ensure the quality of our products become better.

From a technical point of view, the Bitnami container images are built as multi-arch images:

This means users don’t need to specify anything when pulling the container images from Docker Hub, Docker (or any other software) will automatically pull the container image matching the host platform from which the pull command was issued.

Thanks for keeping your trust in us. Enjoy the ARM support!

Bitnami Helm Charts Available as OCI Packages for Early Adopters

We are happy to announce that from this moment, the whole Bitnami Helm Charts catalog is available as OCI packages for Early Adopters! 🎉🎉

You can find them in the bitnamicharts DockerHub organization and deploying any Helm chart should be as simple as running the following command, for instance in the case of the bitnami/postgresql Helm Chart:

helm install my-release oci://registry-1.docker.io/bitnamicharts/postgresql

These Helm charts are 100% OCI-compliant, which means subcharts are also fetched from DockerHub in OCI format.

Why for Early Adopters?

As of now, Helm Charts are pushed to the OCI registry as an experimental catalog independent of our 'official' Helm Charts. We would like to get your feedback before proceeding to fully migrate to OCI.

Because of that, the update cadence is different from the one followed to update the index.yaml stored at https://charts.bitnami.com/, being the index.yaml the official and most updated method for distributing Helm Charts.

What's next?

See below what our plan in the short term is in relation to this new way of distributing Helm Charts:

• The bitnamicharts DockerHub organization will be part of the Docker Verified Publisher Program.

• The OCI Helm Charts available at the bitnamicharts DockerHub organization will be fully included in our automated release process. From that moment, we will consider Bitnami OCI Helm Charts as the production-grade method for distributing and consuming Helm Charts.

Regarding the long term plan, our roadmap is to use OCI packages as the only source of truth, removing the index.yaml stored at https://charts.bitnami.com/.

These changes will be properly announced with specific dates in the future and always giving enough time for our community to migrate. Once the Bitnami OCI Helm Charts catalog is considered production-ready, the Helm Charts in OCI format and the index.yaml will coexist during some months, but the latter will eventually be deprecated.

Useful links

• Use OCI-based registries

• Storing Helm Charts in OCI Registries

• Announcing Docker Hub OCI Artifacts Support

💬 Any feedback is welcomed from those of you using those OCI packages while we work on the pending steps to make the registry production-ready.

Sunsetting Bitnami Launchpads

Authored by Alejandro Gómez, R&D Manager at VMware

The Bitnami Launchpad service was released at the beginning of 2013, when the major cloud service providers—AWS, Azure, and Google—were just developing and launching application marketplaces for their platforms. Bitnami Launchpad offered a simpler user experience to deploy applications in the cloud. Providing our own service also allowed us to give users access to the latest, most up-to-date version faster than was available through the cloud vendor marketplaces. Thousands of applications have been deployed through the Bitnami Launchpad.

However, since those early days, cloud service providers have shortened their validation and publishing timelines, and the user experience for deployment from their marketplaces has improved considerably. Through these cloud platform marketplaces, users not only get a simplified process for procuring software, but now they also get faster access to the most recent version of Bitnami solutions as well as a fully integrated deployment experience with the platform of their choice.

In this context, today we are announcing the deprecation of the Bitnami Launchpad service and recommend deploying our solutions directly through the cloud service providers’ marketplaces. Here are answers to a few questions you might have.

Where can I find Bitnami by VMware solutions?
We have worked with the major cloud service providers to make our software available to you:

• AWS LightSail and AWS Marketplace
• Azure Marketplace
• Google Cloud Marketplace

How does the Bitnami Launchpad deprecation affect my servers?
Your instances will not be stopped or removed because they are running in the platform of your choice under your cloud account. However, you will not be able to launch new servers or manage and access existing servers through the Bitnami Launchpad interface.

December 15, 2022: Launchpads will be accessible, but you will not be able to launch new instances or add new cloud credentials. However, you will still be able to manage your instances from our launchpads as well as from each cloud console.

February 15, 2023: Launchpads will no longer be accessible and you will have to manage your instances from each cloud console.

Which actions do I need to perform?
Option A (recommended): Upgrade your server. Launch a server for the most recent version of the application through one of our partners and migrate your data.

Option B: Ensure access to your existing server through the cloud service provider console. Download your SSH keys from the launchpads to ensure you will be able to access your instances after January 31, 2023. Find information about how to download them for each cloud provider:

• Download information for AWS
• Download information for Azure
• Download information for Google (Note: In Google you will be able to access them through SSH from the GCP console using the integrated Cloud Shell)