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 containers in pods

As we mentioned in the Docker versus Podman main differences section of Chapter 2, Comparing Podman and Docker , Podman offers capabilities to easily start adopting some basic concepts of the de facto container orchestrator named Kubernetes (also sometimes referred to as k8s).

The pod concept was introduced with Kubernetes and represents the smallest execution unit in a Kubernetes cluster. With Podman, users can create empty pods and then run containers inside them easily.

Grouping two or more containers inside a single pod can have many benefits, such as the following:

  • Sharing the same network namespace, IP address included
  • Sharing the same storage volumes for storing persistent data
  • Sharing the same configurations

In addition, placing two or more containers in the same pod will actually enable them to share the same inter-process communication (IPC) Linux namespace. This could be really useful for applications that need to communicate...