Taking a bunch of projects and making containers and flexible helm charts for them is kind of an interesting model. It’s what Redhat and Canonical do with raw Linux packages; they charge for premium support and even patches or extended support.

I was going through one of my clusters, I have two bitnami uses and they are both ‘building blocks’ I use Trino, which uses a metastore which uses postgresql and then some other package uses redis. It seems like both postgresql and redis could/would have containers and charts to install their stuff, where it breaks is the postgresql guys probably want to support “current” and not 4 major releases back, which is kind of normal to see in the wild.

It is kind of an interesting model, I’d love it if rancher or openshift or someone started to seriously compete. Shipping a Kubernetes in a box is nice but if they started packaging up the building blocks, that’s huge too.

Bitnami started out (2010? definitely since 2014) distributing virtual machine images (e.g. preconfigured LAMP stack server) and somehow inherited the official kubernetes helm repo several years ago, which even then, I think we all saw the writing on the wall.