Aaron Peters, unabashed container newbie, explores the Podman management application and why you might pick it over Docker.

I t’s difficult to read technology news these days without seeing headlines about containers. Given the ease with which they let you spin up a given application, test it out, then create a new production instance of it, it’s no wonder. And all this while isolating that application from the rest of the system. Most of these discussions are in the context of enterprise usage, but for the open source enthusiast, containers are an easy way to try out FOSS applications without the need to permanently install them on your system. Particularly if that system is your daily driver. There’s a number of options available that provide similar benefits. An older option is chroots, which specify a particular subdirectory on the host system to run processes. Virtualisation cordons off a portion of the host system’s resources to run a software copy of a completely separate system, even different OSes. But containers offer the best of both options in many ways, sharing system resources while still securely segregating themselves from the host. They enable you to install quickly, run smoothly and uninstall cleanly a large number of applications.

There’s also a number of options available to manage and run containers on your Linux system. In this article, we’re exploring Podman, one of the leading Linux container management tools. The rise of container management options has developed organically alongside the rise in container use. As with any new service, the wider it’s used, the greater the need for tools to manage that service, though management and orchestration here are two different beats: Podman does container runtime management; container orchestration is where Kubernetes excels. More simply, Kubernetes is designed to run a cluster of servers and automatically adjust the

Credit: podman.io

number of containers to load balance, while Podman is designed to run containers individually.

Podman is more of a direct replacement for Docker and in fact follows its Open Container Initiative (aka OCI) design specification, as we’ll see…

Services contained

For those not acquainted with the concept of containers, it’s useful to know a few terms: