Podman is a lot like Docker: a tool for running OCI containers. While it maintains backwards compatibility with Dockerfile and docker-compose syntax, it offers a lot of other benefits:
- daemonless: it can run containers without a daemon process running in the background.
- Rootless: can run containers without root privileges
- pods: can group containers into secluded pods, which share resources and network namespace
Podman has other features I haven’t explored yet, like compatibility with Kubernetes yaml file, and being able to run containers as systemd units.
Have you used podman before? What are your thoughts on it?
We are trying to use podman as a way to run Testcontainers and build images on a kubernetes cluster using Gitlab CI. Building works, but running Testcontainers doesn’t so far :(
Yes but imo it’s easier and nicer to integrate Podman into an existing build, for example with maven
You typically don’t use podman to build images and you would instead use something like buildah.
