Book Image

Podman for DevOps

By : Alessandro Arrichiello, Gianni Salinetti
Book Image

Podman for DevOps

By: Alessandro Arrichiello, Gianni Salinetti

Overview of this book

As containers have become the new de facto standard for packaging applications and their dependencies, understanding how to implement, build, and manage them is now an essential skill for developers, system administrators, and SRE/operations teams. Podman and its companion tools Buildah and Skopeo make a great toolset to boost the development, execution, and management of containerized applications. Starting with the basic concepts of containerization and its underlying technology, this book will help you get your first container up and running with Podman. You'll explore the complete toolkit and go over the development of new containers, their lifecycle management, troubleshooting, and security aspects. Together with Podman, the book illustrates Buildah and Skopeo to complete the tools ecosystem and cover the complete workflow for building, releasing, and managing optimized container images. Podman for DevOps provides a comprehensive view of the full-stack container technology and its relationship with the operating system foundations, along with crucial topics such as networking, monitoring, and integration with systemd, docker-compose, and Kubernetes. By the end of this DevOps book, you'll have developed the skills needed to build and package your applications inside containers as well as to deploy, manage, and integrate them with system services.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
1
Section 1: From Theory to Practice: Running Containers with Podman
7
Section 2: Building Containers from Scratch with Buildah
12
Section 3: Managing and Integrating Containers Securely

Do not run containers with UID 0

Container runtimes can be instructed to perform running processes inside a container with a user ID that's different from the one that initially created the container, similar to what we saw for rootless containers. Running the container's processes as a non-root user can be helpful for security purposes. For example, using an unprivileged user in a container could limit the attack surface inside and outside that container.

By default, a Dockerfile and Containerfile may set the default user as root (that is, UID=0). To avoid this, we can leverage the USER instruction in those build files – for example, USER 1001 – to instruct Buildah or other container build tools to build and run the container image using that particular user (with UID 1001).

If we want to force a specific UID, we need to adjust the permissions of any file, folder, or mount we plan to use with our running containers.

Now, let's learn how to adapt...