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Comment by mrweasel | Hacker News Reader

Updating the Bitnami images is probably a bit of a challenge. From looking at them last year, I believe that they are build around a Bitnami style/framework. They are confusing at best.

If you're Bitnami it probably made sense to do it the image the way they did, but for everyone else, it's just a massive complication.

Personally I don't understand why anyone would have opted to use the Bitnami images for most things. They are really large and complex images and in most cases you'd probably be better of building your own images instead.

My guess is that there's a very small overlap between people who want to maintain Docker images, and the people who chose to run Bitnamis images.

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The Docker images are complex for the sake of the Helm charts, which sometimes need to pass down tons of parameters

These aren't just for your laptop, they're supposed to be able to run in prod

I'm still stuck with 3 bitnami charts that I keep updated by building from source, which includes also building the images, all on our private registry.

That makes some sense. I've only used Bitnami images with Docker compose or as standalone containers. In those case you're frequently better of just mounting in a configuration file, but that won't really work in Kubernetes.

I would argue that if you run Kubernetes, then you frequently already have the resource to maintain your own images.

You'd also have to maintain the helm chart, which is arguably far more work.

If you don't need the bitnami helm chart functionality, using more stock container images is easy and preferable.

I had not used bitnami images for.. probably 5 years at this point and they always seemed servicable in a pinch, usually used for testing and I when I brought this up recently I was also told (by k8s users) that the helm stuff is probably what actually has most people up in arms because it is very common. We're the minority who remember bitnami as a non-critical choice among many.

> Personally I don't understand why anyone would have opted to use the Bitnami images for most things.

At my previous company, we used it because of the low CVE counts. We needed to report the CVE count for every Docker image we used every month, so most of the images were from Bitnami.

There are many enterprise companies freeloading on Bitnami images, and I’m surprised it took Broadcom this long to make this change.

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