DevOps

Goodbye Docker. Hello Podman.

Matt "idev" Plant

• 1 min read

Podman is a tool for managing OCI (and Docker) containers and pods. Since it is backwards compatible to Docker many create an alias for Docker that executes Podman ("alias docker=podman").

Additional features include rootless containers for security plus ease of use and support of pods which are groups of containers that share resources.

There is currently broad and growing support including:

  • many major Linux distros have replaced Docker with Podman
  • VS Code with Microsoft's "Remote - Containers" extension
  • MacOS with Homebrew
  • Windows with WSL2
  • a remote CLI for Podman
  • podman-compose as an alternative to Docker Compose
  • Nomad driver
  • Kubernetes - Podman can generate the Kubernetes YAML files and conversely the ability to play Kubernetes YAML files in Podman pods.

For more info, see https://podman.io/.