Product image selection

All products of the Stackable Data Platform run on Kubernetes and are managed by Stackable Operators. One operator is responsible for exactly one product like Apache Spark. The products are deployed using Pods and their Containers to initialize and run the respective product. Containers require images (e.g. Docker) to run of. These images contain different tools for initialization jobs and/or the actual product itself. Images are prepared for different architectures and different product versions.

There are multiple ways to specify the image used:

Stackable provided images

If your Kubernetes cluster has internet access, the easiest way is to use the publicly available Images from the Image registry hosted by Stackable. If the Kubernetes cluster does not have internet access, a Custom docker registry or Custom images can be used.

Currently, you need to specify the product version. This can be found on the list of supported product versions or on the website of the product itself. This requirement might be relaxed in the future, as every platform release will ship wth a recommended product versions, which will be used by default.

Additionally you can specify the Stackable version: As we need to make changes to the Images from time to time (e.g. security updates), we also have to version them using the Stackable version. An image gets released for every version of the SDP. There are two variants you can choose from:

  1. Fixed version, e.g. 23.7.0. This image will never change.

  2. Release line, e.g. 23.7. This will be a floating tag pointing to the latest patch release of the SDP release line. It will contain the latest security patches, but will also change over time.

If you don’t specify the Stackable version, the operator will use its own version, e.g. 23.7.0. When using a nightly operator or a pr version, it will use the nightly 0.0.0-dev image.

All the available images (with their product and stackable version) can be found in our docker repository.

The versions need to be specified as follows:

spec:
  image:
    productVersion: 3.3.1
    # stackableVersion: 23.7.0 # optional, or e.g. 23.7

Custom docker registry

Custom docker registries can be used to fetch the image from a local image registry rather than from the internet. The perquisite is that you mirror all the required images the same way (with the same name and tag) as the images provided by Stackable.

Afterwards you can use the following snippet to configure your custom docker repo:

spec:
  image:
    productVersion: 3.3.1
    stackableVersion: 23.7.0
    repo: my.corp/myteam/stackable

This will change the image from the default Stackable repository docker.stackable.tech/stackable/kafka:3.3.1-stackable23.7.0 to my.corp/myteam/stackable/kafka:3.3.1-stackable23.7.0.

Custom images

Custom images can be used to fetch arbitrary images from local or public registries. In comparison to the Custom docker registry, this allows to provide self-hosted or user-created images (e.g. user extended Stackable images). If your image has other tags or names than the ones provided by Stackable you need to use this option.

spec:
  image:
    custom: my.corp/myteam/stackable/kafka:latest-and-greatest
    productVersion: 3.3.1

The Stackable Operators configure their respective products based on the product version. This affects e.g. configuration properties or available features. Therefore, the operators are dependent on the product and its product version contained in the custom image. It’s your responsibility to put in the correct product version.