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Broadcom to discontinue free Bitnami Helm charts

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Re: Broadcom to discontinue free Bitnami Helm charts

#111

Post by stackskipton »

ridruejo wrote: post #98
whoIsYou wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

nobody familiar with broadcom or how they are run should be even remotely surprised by this decision

It’s mostly that they don’t understand their own users and potential customers in this particular case of Bitnami. There are so many other ways to increase revenue without alienating the core developer base. Enterprise want stability, breaking changes is a poor way to convince someone to pay you.

Is there other ways that are just as easy?

Last company was pretty heavy free user of Bitnami charts for various things but biggest being Redis clusters. I can't imagine they could convert everything into a cluster using their own charts before this kicks in. Very possible they end up tossing at least a year worth of licensing towards Bitnami.

Re: Broadcom to discontinue free Bitnami Helm charts

#112

Post by pestaa »

znpy wrote: post #91
skissane wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve never used Helm charts. I learned K8S in a shop in which kustomize is the standard and helm is a permitted exception to the standard, but I just never felt any reason to learn helm. Am I missing out? Sometimes the limitations of kustomize annoy me, but we find ways to live with them

Kustomize is nice but you’re missing out on objects lifecycle management. Kustomize had the issue that it would leave objects dangling in the cluster and you had to manually clean them up of you removed them from your kustomization file.

If you use the kustomize controller from the FluxCD project, you can set it to prune unmanaged objects.

In true GitOps, I think it's should be default on.

Re: Broadcom to discontinue free Bitnami Helm charts

#113

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

bo0tzz wrote: post #86
0xbadcafebee wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people like that Helm: - Makes it possible to go from zero to fully running k8s integrated components in 5 seconds by just running 'helm install --repo https://example.com/charts/ mynginx nginx' (very useful: https://artifacthub.io/ ) - Gives the ability to transactionally apply k8s configs, and un-apply them if there is a failure along the way (atomic rollbacks) - Stores copies/versions/etc of each installation…

> zero to fully running (...) in 5 seconds by just running helm install Realistically, a plain helm install without any values rarely if ever gives you the deployment you need, so you have to study the chart anyways. > rollback on failure This is hardly unique to helm. > history metadata without (...) some external system In 2025 you should probably be using gitops anyways, in which case the git repo is your history.

> a plain helm install without any values rarely if ever gives you the deployment you need

works for me most of the time

> This is hardly unique to helm.

So what? The guy was asking what is nice about Helm vs Kustomize. Does Kustomize have rollbacks?

> In 2025 you should probably be using gitops

Gitops is literally just "hey I have some configs in Git and I run some command based on a checkout", i.e. infrastructure as code in a git repo. Gitops does not track live server metadata and deployment history. I don't get why people over-inflate this idea.

Re: Broadcom to discontinue free Bitnami Helm charts

#114

Post by nine_k »

sneak wrote: post #108
jauntywundrkind wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a company more "Take what you can, give nothing back" than Broadcom? Probably not. Broadcom's continued ability to perform well while only serving ever more upmarket areas, & cutting everyone else loose (& generally giving no figs) is fantastically impressive.

Oracle.

In fairness, Oracle keeps developing JVM and Java rather nicely, and keeps it open enough. I had expected worse.

Re: Broadcom to discontinue free Bitnami Helm charts

#115

Post by shepherdjerred »

thayne wrote: post #73
letmeinhere wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you like to count the number of spaces that various items in your manifests are indented and then pass that as an argument to a structure-unaware text file templating engine? Would you like to discover your inevitable yaml file templating errors after submitting those manifests to the cluster? Then yes, you are really missing out!

I really, really, wish we could move away from yaml for tools like this.

CDK8s works really well. I'm sad it hasn't really taken off.

https://cdk8s.io/

Re: Broadcom to discontinue free Bitnami Helm charts

#116

Post by ridruejo »

stackskipton wrote: post #111
ridruejo wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s mostly that they don’t understand their own users and potential customers in this particular case of Bitnami. There are so many other ways to increase revenue without alienating the core developer base. Enterprise want stability, breaking changes is a poor way to convince someone to pay you.

Is there other ways that are just as easy? Last company was pretty heavy free user of Bitnami charts for various things but biggest being Redis clusters. I can't imagine they could convert everything into a cluster using their own charts before this kicks in. Very possible they end up tossing at least a year worth of licensing towards Bitnami.

Yes. Whatever money you get with this is going to be small and short-lived. The big money is in compliance. That is a GTM problem, not a technical one.

Re: Broadcom to discontinue free Bitnami Helm charts

#117

Post by mdaniel »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #42
skissane wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve never used Helm charts. I learned K8S in a shop in which kustomize is the standard and helm is a permitted exception to the standard, but I just never felt any reason to learn helm. Am I missing out? Sometimes the limitations of kustomize annoy me, but we find ways to live with them

I wouldn't say you're missing out. If kustomize works for you, keep using it. I personally use helm because I cannot for the life of me wrap my head around kustomize. I've looked at tutorials, read the docs, and it just doesn't make sense to me. Helm, on the other hand, immediately clicked and I was able to pretty effortlessly write charts for our use. It's just a case of different preference in tools, imo.

Every time I try to get into Kustomize, I feel it just has a documentation problem. It's written in Ph.D.ese without suitable examples

But, if it helps, my mental model of Kustomize is "it's a sequence of JSON Patch [1] operations"[2] which makes it absolutely stellar for mutating someone else's helm chart[3] (or yaml) since you can target anything for updating to your needs

My secondary complaint is that even JetBrains don't have good support for it, which makes working with them extra hard mode

1: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc6902.html

2: it's a very "functional programming language" mental model https://kubectl.docs.kubernetes.io/references/kustomize/kust...

3: https://kubectl.docs.kubernetes.io/references/kustomize/buil...

Re: Broadcom to discontinue free Bitnami Helm charts

#118

Post by mdaniel »

mxey wrote: post #97
0xbadcafebee wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people like that Helm: - Makes it possible to go from zero to fully running k8s integrated components in 5 seconds by just running 'helm install --repo https://example.com/charts/ mynginx nginx' (very useful: https://artifacthub.io/ ) - Gives the ability to transactionally apply k8s configs, and un-apply them if there is a failure along the way (atomic rollbacks) - Stores copies/versions/etc of each installation…

What do you mean by atomic deployment? There are no transactions in the Kubernetes API. Helm has to make one request for each object it creates or modifies, like any other client.

It's a misnomer, but I don't think OP invented that language, it's the word Helm uses for that flag: https://helm.sh/docs/helm/helm_install/#:~:text=the%20instal...

I believe(!) that the "rollback" that helm attempts to put back all the mutated objects, which it can - in theory - do because it maintains the previous state in the Secret objects that contain the rendered(?) and the values for the prior revision

  try:
    for obj in manifest_objects:
      kubectl_apply(obj)
    revisions.push(manifest_objects)
  except:
    old_revision = revisions.pop()
    for obj in old_revision:
      kubectl_apply(obj)
type deal

Re: Broadcom to discontinue free Bitnami Helm charts

#119

Post by mdaniel »

NewJazz wrote: post #52
remram wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I share your dislike of Helm, but FYI there are schemas for values, see for example https://github.com/bitnami/charts/blob/main/bitnami/postgres... and docs https://helm.sh/docs/topics/charts/#schema-files

Ah, I must have met some lazy charts then. Thanks for the correction. Still, it seems like that schema would end up a little inconvenient to integrate into your editor for writing the templates...

Oh, yeah, but who can blame them because writing JSON Schema files by hand is some onoz

Ironically (in the context of this submission) Bitnami has a "--schema" option to their README generator, which is why so many of their charts ship with .schema.json files: https://github.com/bitnami/readme-generator-for-helm/tree/2....

There are likely other "give me a schema for this example JSON/YAML file" but almost certainly wouldn't come with the nice {"description":""} blocks, nor the {"required":false} that an annotated .yaml can offer

While digging up that link, I also spotted the tag line in their GitHub org which is hilarious https://github.com/bitnami#:~:text=trusted%20by%20ops

Re: Broadcom to discontinue free Bitnami Helm charts

#120

Post by mdaniel »

NewJazz wrote: post #52
remram wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I share your dislike of Helm, but FYI there are schemas for values, see for example https://github.com/bitnami/charts/blob/main/bitnami/postgres... and docs https://helm.sh/docs/topics/charts/#schema-files

Ah, I must have met some lazy charts then. Thanks for the correction. Still, it seems like that schema would end up a little inconvenient to integrate into your editor for writing the templates...

> a little inconvenient to integrate into your editor for writing the templates...

Another way that JetBrains tooling shines, because it automatically turns on JSON Schema support for the chart when it has one, no extra # schema=file://... dumbness required

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