Operator Helm chart - Bitnami policy changes

[mbauer-dilt]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
With the pending end of public updates for the Bitnami helm charts (including the one for the operator), an alternative should be found.

Describe the solution you'd like
Ideally some effort should be made to either find a partner willing to continue maintenance of the helm charts.
Given that Bitnami helm charts will stay available, with only the images they refer to being made private, charts could be simply mirrored with image refs being changed. This would reduce maintenance effort to updating the image refs.

Describe alternatives you've considered
There are not really any besides letting the operator helm chart die, which would be a real shame for those that have come to rely on helm.

Additional context
The link to the bitnami announcement

[patrycju]

I don't think we'll get an answer, because it seems RabbitMQ is developed by VMWare (aquired by Broadcom 2 years ago), same company that doing the change in Bitnami Helm charts and docker images.

[duckcompiler]

My guess is that even if we get an answer, it will be that it will be part of the secure images subscription ($6k per month for 12 months) :/
RabbitMQ itself is not in the public catalog https://hub.docker.com/u/bitnamisecure?search=rabbit

[mbauer-dilt]

So what this means is basically, that we'll have to not only find a replacement for the operator chart, but also for the base images of rabbitmq itself too?

[duckcompiler]

Now – August 28th, 2025
Start trying out the new hardened images available to the community today at https://hub.docker.com/u/bitnamisecure.
[...]
August 28th, 2025
The public catalog switches to the limited community-tier subset of container images (the same images that are initially available at https://hub.docker.com/u/bitnamisecure).

Means that the ones over there are final or at least won't be changed anytime soon.. Worth noting that even if they would put the image back on the free/public catalog, it's not intended for production use and only has the latest tag available.

The images I've found are:

• RabbitMQ: https://hub.docker.com/_/rabbitmq
  • Official Docker image
• Operator: https://hub.docker.com/r/rabbitmqoperator/cluster-operator
  • Used as per YML in the releases
• Messaging Topology Operator: https://hub.docker.com/r/rabbitmqoperator/messaging-topology-operator
  • Used as per YML in the releases

For the charts, haven't found any that is decently popular or not closed source.

https://github.com/trueforge-org/truecharts seems to be an alternative if you want to put your trust again in a third-party, but RabbitMQ is (currently) missing there.

However, really worth remembering that RabbitMQ is owned by the same company that switched Bitnami from free to a subscription based plan...