Mirror, vendor or move away from Bitnami Helm charts
The Bitnami charts registry has moved to standard pull-rate limits (10 pulls/hour/IP when unauth'd, or 40 pulls/hour with a free account) on Docker Hub, which has caused an incident with the gitlab-helmfiles pipeline: production#19041 (closed)
Starting December 10th, 2024, only the latest stable branch of applications deployed by Bitnami Helm charts will receive updates in the free Bitnami catalog. Previous versions already released will not be deleted. They are still available to pull from DockerHub.
For example, for PostgreSQL, only branch 17 (the latest stable version) will be maintained in the free catalog. Other upstream-supported branches, such as 13, 14, 15, and 16, will be exclusively available through Bitnami Premium.Beginning on December 16th, 2024, all free Bitnami Helm charts and containers will be subject to standard pull-rate limits and pull caps in Docker Hub.
If we want to continue those charts, we need to either:
- buy a Docker Hub subscription, Pro or higher
- buy Bitnami Premium, $50k/year
- mirror them elsewhere, with Artifact Registry, Harbor, or something else
- vendor them
But considering the costs, risks, and the fact that the free charts will now be limited to stable/LTS releases only, it might be preferable to move away from Bitnami charts entirely, which means:
- inventory all Bitnami charts we are currently using (
common,external-dns,memcached,redis,thanos...) - find and evaluate alternative well-maintained charts for them and migrate to them (eg.
external-dnscomes with its own chart)
There is also a possibility that a community fork will eventually appear as a reaction to it, which would be ideal.