[Bug]: Impending breakage: Bitnami image changes affect Jaeger optional dependencies (Elasticsearch/Kafka)

[dblane-digicatapult]

What happened?

The Jaeger Helm chart references elasticsearch and kafka as optional subcharts, conditionally enabled via:

• provisionDataStore.elasticsearch
• provisionDataStore.kafka

Both subcharts are sourced from Bitnami and rely on versioned container images hosted on Docker Hub, which are about to be deprecated.

Bitnami have announced (bitnami/charts#35164) that, as of 28 August 2025:

• Only latest image tags will remain publicly available for free,
• All production-grade images will move to the paid "Bitnami Secure" registry,
• Existing tagged images will be removed or relocated to an unsupported legacy namespace,
• Free images will no longer be suitable for production use.

This will cause Jaeger installs or upgrades to fail for any users who enable the above options and rely on the default subchart values.

Steps to reproduce

1. Install the Jaeger Helm chart with either provisionDataStore.elasticsearch=true or provisionDataStore.kafka=true.
2. Wait until after 28 August 2025.
3. Attempt to upgrade or redeploy Jaeger.
4. Observe failure due to Bitnami removing versioned container image tags from Docker Hub.

Expected behavior

Optional components like elasticsearch and kafka should remain deployable using this Helm chart, without breakage due to upstream image removals.

Relevant log output

N/A

Screenshot

N/A

Additional context

This is a time-sensitive issue with potentially high impact:

• After 28 August 2025, deployments that rely on Bitnami images via these subcharts may fail due to image pull errors,
• Users could unknowingly deploy unstable versions (:latest) or find their clusters breaking silently,
• This particularly affects production environments where users expect stability and reproducibility.

Because this breakage will appear during Helm operations or cluster restarts, users may not link the failure to upstream image changes.

Ref:

• Bitnami deprecation issue: Upcoming changes to the Bitnami catalog (effective August 28th, 2025) bitnami/charts#35164
• Docker Hub: https://hub.docker.com/u/bitnamisecure

Jaeger backend version

N/A

SDK

N/A

Pipeline

N/A

Stogage backend

ElasticSearch, Kafka

Operating system

No response

Deployment model

N/A

Deployment configs

[yurishkuro]

Do you have a proposal?

[dblane-digicatapult]

Given the very short turn around time this should probably be split into three main sections.

---

1. Raise Awareness

Make the upstream risk clear to users:

• Add a prominent warning in the README near the top:

  Deprecation Notice: Bitnami images used in optional subcharts (elasticsearch, kafka) will be removed from Docker Hub after 28 August 2025. See below for migration and override guidance.

• Emit a warning from NOTES.txt if either datastore is enabled:

  WARNING: Elasticsearch or Kafka is enabled and uses Bitnami images that may be removed after 28 Aug 2025.
  Override the image repositories or disable provisioning. See README for details.
  

• Include Helm override snippet for existing users, e.g. for elasticsearch dependent users:

  helm upgrade my-jaeger jaegertracing/jaeger \
    --set elasticsearch.image.repository=bitnamilegacy/elasticsearch \
    --set elasticsearch.metrics.image.repository=bitnamilegacy/elasticsearch-exporter \
    --set elasticsearch.sysctlImage.repository=bitnamilegacy/os-shell \
    --set elasticsearch.volumePermissions.image.repository=bitnamilegacy/os-shell \

---

2. Ensure Continuity of Operations

Prevent breakage in future chart releases:

• Freeze elasticsearch and kafka subchart versions in Chart.yaml to known-safe versions until a replacement plan is ready.

• Update values.yaml to override default image repositories:

  elasticsearch:
    image:
      repository: bitnamilegacy/elasticsearch
    sysctlImage:
      repository: bitnamilegacy/os-shell
    volumePermissions:
      image:
        repository: bitnamilegacy/os-shell
    metrics:
      image:
        repository: bitnamilegacy/elasticsearch-exporter
  
  kafka:
    image:
      repository: bitnamilegacy/kafka

...etc

This ensures future Helm installs and upgrades continue to function past the Bitnami cutoff.

---

3. Plan for Long-Term Sustainability

Bitnami’s change exposes a fragility in Helm chart dependency strategy.

• Evaluate replacements:

  • Elasticsearch: https://github.com/elastic/cloud-on-k8s/tree/main/deploy/eck-stack (Note, this chart enables default features probably not desirable for a bare elastcisearch install)
  • Kafka: https://strimzi.io/ or https://docs.confluent.io/ Both of these are operators and are probably far too opinionated, so these may be undesirable.

• When replacements are selected, ship them in a new major release and clearly document migration paths, although this may be out of scope for

---

Summary

Phase	Action
Awareness	README, NOTES.txt warning, Helm override example
Continuity	Freeze subcharts, override default image repos to bitnamilegacy
Long-term roadmap	Evaluate OEM/community-maintained replacements for future major chart versions

Happy to help draft PRs or updates to values.yaml, NOTES.txt, or documentation.

[dblane-digicatapult]

Bitnami also very helpfully created a "secure images" NOTES validation failure if the imageRepository is changed from the defaults.

bitnami/charts#30850

This necessitates setting keys like subchart.global.security.allowInsecureImages to true for every single bitnami subchart.

[gawbul]

I just hit this issue when upgrading my cluster and had to update the image.repository references in the elasticsearch values to use bitnamilegacy instead. Only a workaround for now. Need to find some replacement images/charts asap.