Update Base Prow Images

[NiJuFirenzia]

It looks like the Prow Base Images have not been updated past July 19th 2025 (https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/prow/blob/main/.ko.yaml). The base images are still from the previous gcr.io registry. Can we get these updated so new Prow images created have up to date base images?

[petr-muller]

This is related to kubernetes/test-infra#35968 / kubernetes/test-infra#35799 , right?

@BenTheElder @upodroid what's the right sequence here? I guess something like kubernetes/test-infra#35799 needs to merge (although Ben says that maybe not - the base images are still built in k/test-infra though) builds images and then we can update and also set up some automatic bumping like suggested in kubernetes/test-infra#35968 (comment) .

Will the new base images be published somewhere else than gcr.io?

[upodroid]

Hey, I have a solution to this problem.

We'll introduce an autobumper to the prow repo to fetch the latest images from gcr.io/k8s-staging-test-infra

We'll have dependabot bumping images in the test-infra repositories and we should have an automated loop for dep bumps. We can intervene in the very unlikely chance that we ship a bad update.

I need @BenTheElder to merge my dependabot PR.

[petr-muller]

Makes sense, thanks! Voiced support in your dependabot PR, I can set up the autobumper afterwards.

[BenTheElder]

I think we should move any solely used by prow image build base-images to this repo, and handle them differently from the images we use for Kubernetes CI jobs.

Those are two separate use-cases with very different concerns.

[BenTheElder]

We don't have to move them, but I think it will be easier to reason about how we handle updates when it's "tiny image with git for cloning in prow" versus "big image with lots of CI tools for end to end testing".