Confluent Platform Docker Images Will No Longer Ship with Package Manager configs to update Confluent Platform OS packages

After October 2021, Confluent Supplied Docker Images will no longer have a Yum or Apt configuration pointing to Confluent-hosted https://packages.confluent.io infrastructure.

• cp-docker images (All releases after October 2021)

• Customers who invoke yum update confluent-* (or apt) in their derived docker images.

• Customers who invoke yum update confluent-* (or apt) in their running docker containers.

There existed a “hidden” or “undocumented” feature of Confluent Platform Docker Images where customers running a container (eg: 6.2.0) could sudo yum update confluent-* packages to the next released version (eg: 6.2.0 -tagged container could yum update to 6.2.1 release).

This feature has been removed as part of due to an Confluent release redesign initiative, in particular these are the factors that guided this decision:

• This was never a supported feature.

• Not all images “support” upgrades this way (any ksql image doesn’t utilize OS packages & requires rebuilding the ksql-images project for updates)

• In terms of docker “best practices” it is not ideal to yum update a running container, but instead deploy the next docker image tag release (eg: 6.2.0 → 6.2.1) and utilize volumes to preserve data between upgrades.

There is no resolution on an undocumented / unsupported feature.

However for customer’s who will be impacted by this unsupported feature, they may add the package manager configs to use https://packages.confluent.io as per:

• https://docs.confluent.io/platform/current/installation/installing_cp/deb-ubuntu.html#get-the-software

• https://docs.confluent.io/platform/current/installation/installing_cp/rhel-centos.html#get-the-software