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!