Support for ARM64 architecture in Bitnami container images

[carrodher]

Currently, the Bitnami container images do not support the ARM64 architecture.

We are aware of the growing interest in this architecture and there are ongoing internal plans to release the Bitnami Community Catalog for ARM64 in the future, definitely, it is something we would like to support, but we need to find the bandwidth to do it in a proper way maintaining our quality standards.

At the moment, only our base image bitnami/minideb has support for ARM64 thanks to the community contribution in this PR: bitnami/minideb#90

Although there are some initiatives and Engineering work going on, we cannot guarantee a specific ETA for this topic. We will update this issue with more information.

Thanks for using Bitnami Containers and Helm Charts!

---

Update 24th February: ARM containers are already available in DockerHub, see #7305 (comment)

[samip5]

Are most of your builds being bult on either Travis CI or CircleCI?

Eg, how is the MariaDB container being built? I cannot find build files for it? (https://github.com/bitnami/bitnami-docker-mariadb)

[carrodher]

Are most of your builds being built on either Travis CI or CircleCI?

Eg, how is the MariaDB container being built? I cannot find build files for it? (https://github.com/bitnami/bitnami-docker-mariadb)

There is an internal pipeline based on Jenkins where we build the image with the docker CLI and then run several tests using the image in a deployment based on docker-compose and also in k8s via Helm Charts, you can find more information about this test and release process in the following link: https://docs.bitnami.com/tutorials/bitnami-best-practices-hardening-charts/#bitnami-release-process-and-tests.

Once tested the image, is published in different repositories such as

$ docker images
REPOSITORY                         TAG       IMAGE ID       CREATED        SIZE
public.ecr.aws/bitnami/apache      2.4       3156fbf7dfbd   23 hours ago   176MB
quay.io/bitnami/apache             2.4       3156fbf7dfbd   23 hours ago   176MB
docker.io/bitnami/apache           2.4       3156fbf7dfbd   23 hours ago   176MB
gcr.io/bitnami-containers/apache   2.4       3156fbf7dfbd   23 hours ago   176MB

[samip5]

Are most of your builds being built on either Travis CI or CircleCI?
Eg, how is the MariaDB container being built? I cannot find build files for it? (https://github.com/bitnami/bitnami-docker-mariadb)

There is an internal pipeline based on Jenkins where we build the image with the docker CLI and then run several tests using the image in a deployment based on docker-compose and also in k8s via Helm Charts, you can find more information about this test and release process in the following link: https://docs.bitnami.com/tutorials/bitnami-best-practices-hardening-charts/#bitnami-release-process-and-tests.

Once tested the image, is published in different repositories such as

$ docker images
REPOSITORY                         TAG       IMAGE ID       CREATED        SIZE
public.ecr.aws/bitnami/apache      2.4       3156fbf7dfbd   23 hours ago   176MB
quay.io/bitnami/apache             2.4       3156fbf7dfbd   23 hours ago   176MB
docker.io/bitnami/apache           2.4       3156fbf7dfbd   23 hours ago   176MB
gcr.io/bitnami-containers/apache   2.4       3156fbf7dfbd   23 hours ago   176MB

Where is the Docker version used defined?
What would need to be PR'ed to be able to produce multi-arch images with Docker Buildx?

[carrodher]

Are most of your builds being built on either Travis CI or CircleCI?
Eg, how is the MariaDB container being built? I cannot find build files for it? (https://github.com/bitnami/bitnami-docker-mariadb)

There is an internal pipeline based on Jenkins where we build the image with the docker CLI and then run several tests using the image in a deployment based on docker-compose and also in k8s via Helm Charts, you can find more information about this test and release process in the following link: https://docs.bitnami.com/tutorials/bitnami-best-practices-hardening-charts/#bitnami-release-process-and-tests.
Once tested the image, is published in different repositories such as

$ docker images
REPOSITORY                         TAG       IMAGE ID       CREATED        SIZE
public.ecr.aws/bitnami/apache      2.4       3156fbf7dfbd   23 hours ago   176MB
quay.io/bitnami/apache             2.4       3156fbf7dfbd   23 hours ago   176MB
docker.io/bitnami/apache           2.4       3156fbf7dfbd   23 hours ago   176MB
gcr.io/bitnami-containers/apache   2.4       3156fbf7dfbd   23 hours ago   176MB

Where is the Docker version used defined?
What would need to be PR'ed to be able to produce multi-arch images with Docker Buildx?

I'm sorry but this part of the test & release pipeline is not public. You can find the Dockerfile for all the assets present in the catalog by looking into the different https://github.com/bitnami/bitnami-docker-ASSET repositories. As the Dockerfile is public you can build the image using them. In the same repository, you can customize the bash scripts used for the initialization logic.

In some of the above-mentioned issues, there are some community members that tried to customize some repositories to make them compatible with different architectures.

[samip5]

Are most of your builds being built on either Travis CI or CircleCI?
Eg, how is the MariaDB container being built? I cannot find build files for it? (https://github.com/bitnami/bitnami-docker-mariadb)

There is an internal pipeline based on Jenkins where we build the image with the docker CLI and then run several tests using the image in a deployment based on docker-compose and also in k8s via Helm Charts, you can find more information about this test and release process in the following link: https://docs.bitnami.com/tutorials/bitnami-best-practices-hardening-charts/#bitnami-release-process-and-tests.
Once tested the image, is published in different repositories such as

$ docker images
REPOSITORY                         TAG       IMAGE ID       CREATED        SIZE
public.ecr.aws/bitnami/apache      2.4       3156fbf7dfbd   23 hours ago   176MB
quay.io/bitnami/apache             2.4       3156fbf7dfbd   23 hours ago   176MB
docker.io/bitnami/apache           2.4       3156fbf7dfbd   23 hours ago   176MB
gcr.io/bitnami-containers/apache   2.4       3156fbf7dfbd   23 hours ago   176MB

Where is the Docker version used defined?
What would need to be PR'ed to be able to produce multi-arch images with Docker Buildx?

I'm sorry but this part of the test & release pipeline is not public. You can find the Dockerfile for all the assets present in the catalog by looking into the different https://github.com/bitnami/bitnami-docker-ASSET repositories. As the Dockerfile is public you can build the image using them. In the same repository, you can customize the bash scripts used for the initialization logic.

In some of the above-mentioned issues, there are some community members that tried to customize some repositories to make them compatible with different architectures.

Okey so you kind of say that the community could help, but without the ability to see all of the build steps, there's pretty much NO WAY for people outside the org to help properly for example in the mariadb container build process to get it multi arched.

I cannot help without knowning how it's supposed to work under CI, as just changing docker files is not going to be nowhere enough to get this really anywhere. docker buildx requires a greater than 19.x, cannot remember.

What does this need to get this bumped to a higher priority in your roadmap?

[carrodher]

Are most of your builds being built on either Travis CI or CircleCI?
Eg, how is the MariaDB container being built? I cannot find build files for it? (https://github.com/bitnami/bitnami-docker-mariadb)

There is an internal pipeline based on Jenkins where we build the image with the docker CLI and then run several tests using the image in a deployment based on docker-compose and also in k8s via Helm Charts, you can find more information about this test and release process in the following link: https://docs.bitnami.com/tutorials/bitnami-best-practices-hardening-charts/#bitnami-release-process-and-tests.
Once tested the image, is published in different repositories such as

$ docker images
REPOSITORY                         TAG       IMAGE ID       CREATED        SIZE
public.ecr.aws/bitnami/apache      2.4       3156fbf7dfbd   23 hours ago   176MB
quay.io/bitnami/apache             2.4       3156fbf7dfbd   23 hours ago   176MB
docker.io/bitnami/apache           2.4       3156fbf7dfbd   23 hours ago   176MB
gcr.io/bitnami-containers/apache   2.4       3156fbf7dfbd   23 hours ago   176MB

Where is the Docker version used defined?
What would need to be PR'ed to be able to produce multi-arch images with Docker Buildx?

I'm sorry but this part of the test & release pipeline is not public. You can find the Dockerfile for all the assets present in the catalog by looking into the different https://github.com/bitnami/bitnami-docker-ASSET repositories. As the Dockerfile is public you can build the image using them. In the same repository, you can customize the bash scripts used for the initialization logic.
In some of the above-mentioned issues, there are some community members that tried to customize some repositories to make them compatible with different architectures.

Okey so you kind of say that the community could help, but without the ability to see all of the build steps, there's pretty much NO WAY for people outside the org to help properly for example in the mariadb container build process to get it multi arched.

I cannot help without knowning how it's supposed to work under CI, as just changing docker files is not going to be nowhere enough to get this really anywhere. docker buildx requires a greater than 19.x, cannot remember.

There are some parts public like the Dockerfile, bash initialization logic, etc so users can build their own image customizing it. What is not public is the internal logic we use to compile the source code if needed, build, test, and release the Bitnami container images.

What does this need to get this bumped to a higher priority in your roadmap?

The internal roadmap is based on business and product decisions, taking into account community users but other variables as well.

[samip5]

Where is the Docker version used defined?
What would need to be PR'ed to be able to produce multi-arch images with Docker Buildx?

I'm sorry but this part of the test & release pipeline is not public. You can find the Dockerfile for all the assets present in the catalog by looking into the different https://github.com/bitnami/bitnami-docker-ASSET repositories. As the Dockerfile is public you can build the image using them. In the same repository, you can customize the bash scripts used for the initialization logic.
In some of the above-mentioned issues, there are some community members that tried to customize some repositories to make them compatible with different architectures.

Okey so you kind of say that the community could help, but without the ability to see all of the build steps, there's pretty much NO WAY for people outside the org to help properly for example in the mariadb container build process to get it multi arched.
I cannot help without knowning how it's supposed to work under CI, as just changing docker files is not going to be nowhere enough to get this really anywhere. docker buildx requires a greater than 19.x, cannot remember.

There are some parts public like the Dockerfile, bash initialization logic, etc so users can build their own image customizing it. What is not public is the internal logic we use to compile the source code if needed, build, test, and release the Bitnami container images.

Can you share any information about the whole process? Jenkins processes the Dockerfiles, is Jenkins build pipeline architecture aware as in does it support multiple architecture building via Docker Buildx?

What does this need to get this bumped to a higher priority in your roadmap?

The internal roadmap is based on business and product decisions, taking into account community users but other variables as well.

Which doesn't say much, and I don't feel like you actually answered my question so please do. Does one need to throw money at you before you take this as a higher priority than what it currently is?

[carrodher]

Where is the Docker version used defined?
What would need to be PR'ed to be able to produce multi-arch images with Docker Buildx?

I'm sorry but this part of the test & release pipeline is not public. You can find the Dockerfile for all the assets present in the catalog by looking into the different https://github.com/bitnami/bitnami-docker-ASSET repositories. As the Dockerfile is public you can build the image using them. In the same repository, you can customize the bash scripts used for the initialization logic.
In some of the above-mentioned issues, there are some community members that tried to customize some repositories to make them compatible with different architectures.

Okey so you kind of say that the community could help, but without the ability to see all of the build steps, there's pretty much NO WAY for people outside the org to help properly for example in the mariadb container build process to get it multi arched.
I cannot help without knowning how it's supposed to work under CI, as just changing docker files is not going to be nowhere enough to get this really anywhere. docker buildx requires a greater than 19.x, cannot remember.

There are some parts public like the Dockerfile, bash initialization logic, etc so users can build their own image customizing it. What is not public is the internal logic we use to compile the source code if needed, build, test, and release the Bitnami container images.

Can you share any information about the whole process? Jenkins processes the Dockerfiles, is Jenkins build pipeline architecture aware as in does it support multiple architecture building via Docker Buildx?

In a generic way, the internal pipeline is tracking the upstream repositories, when there is a new version in any of the tracked applications, the source code is downloaded and compiled, then the Dockerfile and the initialization logic is generated (those files are public), with those files the container image is built, before releasing it, the container image is tested as part of different docker-composes and the Helm chart; if everything works as expected the container image is pushed to the different repositories.

The logic of this pipeline is not public, users can contribute to the Helm Charts (this is 100% public) or the container initialization logic, Dockerfile, docker-compose.yaml, etc; but unfortunately not with the pipeline logic itself that is the one in charge of build the image

What does this need to get this bumped to a higher priority in your roadmap?

The internal roadmap is based on business and product decisions, taking into account community users but other variables as well.

Which doesn't say much, and I don't feel like you actually answered my question so please do. Does one need to throw money at you before you take this as a higher priority than what it currently is?

When defining the roadmap, different parameters are considered such as the capacity of the team; we are a small team and we can't address all the requests we receive such as adding new Helm Charts to the catalog, implement new features, fix existing bugs, or as in this case, support a new arch. We would like to address everything ASAP, but the capacity is not infinite so we need to prioritize some topics.

Here you can find more info about Tanzu Application Catalog (TAC), which is the paid version of the Bitnami Community Catalog (BCC). In terms of the arch, ARM64 is not supported in TAC nor BCC, but other distros such as CentOS, PhotonOS, or Ubuntu are supported in TAC while only Debian is supported in BCC.

[samip5]

Where is the Docker version used defined?
What would need to be PR'ed to be able to produce multi-arch images with Docker Buildx?

I'm sorry but this part of the test & release pipeline is not public. You can find the Dockerfile for all the assets present in the catalog by looking into the different https://github.com/bitnami/bitnami-docker-ASSET repositories. As the Dockerfile is public you can build the image using them. In the same repository, you can customize the bash scripts used for the initialization logic.
In some of the above-mentioned issues, there are some community members that tried to customize some repositories to make them compatible with different architectures.

Okey so you kind of say that the community could help, but without the ability to see all of the build steps, there's pretty much NO WAY for people outside the org to help properly for example in the mariadb container build process to get it multi arched.
I cannot help without knowning how it's supposed to work under CI, as just changing docker files is not going to be nowhere enough to get this really anywhere. docker buildx requires a greater than 19.x, cannot remember.

There are some parts public like the Dockerfile, bash initialization logic, etc so users can build their own image customizing it. What is not public is the internal logic we use to compile the source code if needed, build, test, and release the Bitnami container images.

Can you share any information about the whole process? Jenkins processes the Dockerfiles, is Jenkins build pipeline architecture aware as in does it support multiple architecture building via Docker Buildx?

In a generic way, the internal pipeline is tracking the upstream repositories, when there is a new version in any of the tracked applications, the source code is downloaded and compiled, then the Dockerfile and the initialization logic is generated (those files are public), with those files the container image is built, before releasing it, the container image is tested as part of different docker-composes and the Helm chart; if everything works as expected the container image is pushed to the different repositories.

The logic of this pipeline is not public, users can contribute to the Helm Charts (this is 100% public) or the container initialization logic, Dockerfile, docker-compose.yaml, etc; but unfortunately not with the pipeline logic itself that is the one in charge of build the image

So basically the portion that would be required to have changes made to it for multi-architecture image building aka pipeline logic that's charge in the building of it, is not public. So that would probably warrant a note on anything Bitnami stating that multi-arch is not supported on most of the images. Currently every time I see Bitnami anything, I take the assumption that there's no multi-arch images, which make it not usable at all.

Can you say the reason why the pipeline logic itself is not public?

What does this need to get this bumped to a higher priority in your roadmap?

The internal roadmap is based on business and product decisions, taking into account community users but other variables as well.

Which doesn't say much, and I don't feel like you actually answered my question so please do. Does one need to throw money at you before you take this as a higher priority than what it currently is?

When defining the roadmap, different parameters are considered such as the capacity of the team; we are a small team and we can't address all the requests we receive such as adding new Helm Charts to the catalog, implement new features, fix existing bugs, or as in this case, support a new arch. We would like to address everything ASAP, but the capacity is not infinite so we need to prioritize some topics.

Here you can find more info about Tanzu Application Catalog (TAC), which is the paid version of the Bitnami Community Catalog (BCC). In terms of the arch, ARM64 is not supported in TAC nor BCC, but other distros such as CentOS, PhotonOS, or Ubuntu are supported in TAC while only Debian is supported in BCC.

Okey, so if I were a paying customer of yours, would that actually make a difference in terms of getting an issue fast tracked? One would hope so, but somehow I doubt it.

[anthr76]

Is there a good reason to re-build every single image and by extension not have compatibility with an upstream image when using the Bitnami charts?

[adm271828]

I'm sorry but this part of the test & release pipeline is not public. You can find the Dockerfile for all the assets present in the catalog by looking into the different https://github.com/bitnami/bitnami-docker-ASSET repositories. As the Dockerfile is public you can build the image using them. In the same repository, you can customize the bash scripts used for the initialization logic.

In some of the above-mentioned issues, there are some community members that tried to customize some repositories to make them compatible with different architectures.

Hi,

The point is the Dockerfiles can not be used as they fetch precompiled binaries (directives such as: RUN . /opt/bitnami/scripts/libcomponent.sh && component_unpack ...), that are not available for ARM architecture.

So, in order to use the Dockerfiles, one has to recreate the binary archives with the very same software components selected by bitnami, without knowing which ones and not knowing how they were compiled. This may be achieved with great motivation and time but, in practice, is a waste of time. When I started a project that needed ARM images, I believed that it woud not be (too) difficult to rebuild docker images compatible with bitnami's chart, but I gave up pretty soon.

I wonder if people/organisations that choose to make bitnami's Helm Chart as their official chart (probably because they feel those chart's quality is good and possibly other good reasons) even realize that they, in fact, restrict the use of the chart to architectures supported by bitnami.

Best regards.

[balusarakesh]

• has anyone gotten a chance to try and build a bitnami docker image with publicly available ARM64 packages instead of the ones compiled by bitnami? if yes, did it work? example like this...we notice that we are downloading a package from bitnami servers....if we replaced that with the publicly available package, would that work?
• we are kind of in a hurry to migrate to ARM64 and we'd like to know if there is any alternative

Thank you

[samip5]

• we are kind of in a hurry to migrate to ARM64 and we'd like to know if there is any alternative

Thank you

Altirnative is to not use Bitnami images on arm64.

[adm271828]

• has anyone gotten a chance to try and build a bitnami docker image with publicly available ARM64 packages instead of the ones compiled by bitnami? if yes, did it work? example like this...we notice that we are downloading a package from bitnami servers....if we replaced that with the publicly available package, would that work?
• we are kind of in a hurry to migrate to ARM64 and we'd like to know if there is any alternative

Thank you

As far as I understood, bitnami packages have nothing to do with publicly available packages. They are the result of bitnami's secret build process and have their own structure. Packages enumerated in bitnami_components.json are downloaded with the corresponding lines in Dockerfile (RUN . /opt/bitnami/scripts/libcomponent.sh && component_unpack ...).

Some charts are said to be compatible with official docker images. I tried it with postgresql and was indeed able to deploy and boot the official ARM64 docker image with bitnami's chart.

However the "compatibility" is extremely limited and missleading. Almost every more elaborated options in the chart (that make bitnami's chart worth) were simply not working because the docker image was not compatible in the first place.

So if you started a projet with bitnami's charts and images, you're probably stuck to architectures selected by bitnami

Best regards.

[julweber]

+1 It would be so great to be able to use the bitnami helm charts on my raspberry pi

[turowicz]

@carrodher is anything planned for this?

[carrodher]

We are making some progress on different internal tools to allow the automated pipeline to compile and build images based on the new architecture, but there is still a way to go. We will update this thread once there are some visible progress

[blowfishpro]

all attempts at emulating them via Rosetta or setting the platform in the docker-compose are failing

This is sort of a tangent but is there something specific that prevents those images from being run under virtualization? I've been able to run other amd64 images on my ARM mac.

[eddywashere]

Hi all, we are more than happy to announce that from now on the Bitnami container catalog is available as multi-arch in Docker Hub 🎉 🎉

This means you 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.

Here you can find more info about this announcement.

As usual, please create a new GitHub issue if you would like to report any bug or problem or directly contribute by creating a PR. Here you can find the contributing guidelines.

Please note, at this very moment the following container images are not available as multi-arch due to different technical issues:

• airflow (airflow-scheduler, airflow-worker)
• cassandra
• concourse
• discourse
• kong
• mastodon
• mongodb
• mxnet
• percona-mysql
• rails
• redmine
• sonarqube
• supabase (postgrest, supabase-postgres-meta, supabase-postgres, supabase-realtime, supabase-storage)

Any news on supporting discourse arm image? or where can I track that?

[carrodher]

Any news on supporting discourse arm image? or where can I track that?

At this moment there are no plans to work on the pending assets since ARM support was recently added and it is very likely that the issues we faced in the past are still present. We will revisit the list of exceptions in the future and we will update this issue.

[bwmills]

Thanks everyone, we are definitely interested in running mongodb on arm64 on AWS storage optimized instances in EKS.