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

Chapter 8: Choosing the Container Base Image

The fastest and easiest way to learn about and get some experience with containers is to start working with pre-built container images, as we saw in the previous chapters. After a deep dive into container management, we discovered that sometimes, the available service, its configuration, or even the application version is not the one that our project requires. Then, we introduced Buildah and its feature for building custom container images. In this chapter, we are going to address another important topic that is often questioned in community and enterprise projects: the choice of a container base image.

Choosing the right container base image is an important task of the container journey: a container base image is the underlying operating system layer that our system's service, application, or code will rely on. Due to this, we should choose one that fits our best practices concerning security and updates.

In this chapter, we...