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

The Open Container Initiative image format

As we described in Chapter 1, Introduction to Container Technology, back in 2013, Docker was introduced in the container landscape and became very popular rapidly.

At a high level, the Docker team introduced the concept of container images and container registries, which was a game-changer. Another important step was being able to extract containerd projects from Docker and donate them to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). This motivated the open source community to start working seriously on container engines that could be injected into an orchestration layer, such as Kubernetes.

Similarly, in 2015, Docker, with the help of many other companies (Red Hat, AWS, Google, Microsoft, IBM, and others), started the Open Container Initiative (OCI) under the Linux Foundation umbrella.

These contributors developed the Runtime Specification (runtime-spec) and the Image Specification (image-spec) to describe how the API and the architecture...