Recently, I published a Helm Cheat Sheet and used Bitnami charts in several examples
A redditor made a fair point: relying on bitnami as a Helm repo may not age well, given the recent announcements around Bitnami's distribution model. That feedback is legitimate, and I appreciate it.
Let's separate quality from availability. Bitnami charts did not become popular by accident. They are among the most:
👉 standardized,
👉 well-documented,
👉 security-aware,
👉 production-tested Helm charts in the ecosystem.
For years, they have been a reference implementation for how Helm charts should be structured.
The enshittification
Enshittification is when a product that worked well gets worse over time because business decisions start to matter more than users.
That’s exactly what we’re seeing here. On July 16, Broadcom announced major changes to Bitnami's container image distribution, effective September 29:
👉 Publicly built images and Helm charts are going away.
👉 The bitnami organization will be deleted.
👉 Access to stable images will move behind a paid Bitnami Secure Images offering.
👉 A limited free tier will exist, but only with :latest tags, intended for development.
👉 Legacy images will remain available but unsupported and unpatched.
👉 Source code for images and Helm charts will remain available, but teams will need to build and publish artifacts themselves.
This creates real friction (I guess) for teams that rely on Bitnami today, especially those with mature/complex CI/CD pipelines.
The good news
There is a potential pragmatic path forward.
🐳 Docker Hardened Images (DHI) provide a strong replacement for many Bitnami use cases:
- hardened, minimal images,
- near-zero CVEs,
- verifiable SBOMs and provenance,
- drop-in compatibility for many workloads.
For many teams, this means they can (in many cases) swap the base image without rewriting charts, pipelines, or operational practices. That is a big deal!
So yes, the comment is valid. And also yes, Bitnami charts remain an excellent learning and structural reference.
📋 The real takeaway is not "stop using Bitnami". The pragmatic choice for now (for many teams) is to use them with Docker Hardened Images.
Don't foget to check out my courses:
👉 Helm in Practice takes you from Helm fundamentals to production-grade usage. It focuses on how Helm behaves in real environments: chart design, release lifecycle, upgrades, rollbacks, debugging, dependencies, CRDs, security, and GitOps integration.
👉 Cloud Native Microservices with Kubernetes zooms out to the platform level. It shows how microservices are designed, deployed, and operated on Kubernetes, and how tools like Helm fit into a complete cloud-native delivery workflow.
Both guides are hands-on, experience-driven, and written for people who run real systems, not toy clusters. If you’re ready to move from knowing what Helm is to using it with confidence in production, you’ll find everything you need there.
Explore other guides on FAUN.sensei() and don't forget to follow me on Linkedin.
