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

Inspecting container information

A running container exposes a set of configuration data and metadata ready to be consumed. Podman implements the podman inspect command to print all the container configurations and runtime information. In its simplest form, we can simply pass the container ID or name, like this:

$ podman inspect <Container_ID_or_Name>

This command prints a JSON output with all the container configurations. For the sake of space, we will list some of the most notable fields here:

  • Path: The container entry point path. We will dig deeper into entry points later when we analyze Dockerfiles.
  • Args: The arguments passed to the entry point.
  • State: The container's current state, including crucial information such as the executed PID, the common PID, the OCI version, and the health check status.
  • Image: The ID of the image used to run the container.
  • Name: The container name.
  • MountLabel: Container mount label for Security-Enhanced...