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

Running your first container

Now, it’s time to finally run our first container.

In the previous section, we uncovered how to install Podman on our favorite Linux distribution, as well as what’s included in the base packages once installed. Now, we can start using our daemonless container engine.

Running containers in Podman is handled through the podman run command, which accepts many options for controlling the behavior of the just ran container, its isolation, its communication, its storage, and so on.

The easiest and shortest Podman command for running a brand-new container is as follows:

$ podman run <imageID>

We have to replace the imageID string with the image name/location/tag we want to run. If the image is not present in the cache or we have not downloaded it before, Podman will pull the image for us from the respective container registry.

Interactive and pseudo-tty

To introduce this command and its options, let’s start simple...