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

Meet Buildah, Podman's companion tool for builds

Podman does an excellent job in plain builds with Dockerfiles/Containerfiles and helps teams to preserve their previously implemented build pipelines without the need for new investments.

However, when it comes to more specialized build tasks, or when users need more control on the build workflow, with the option of including scripting logic, the Dockerfile/Containerfile approach shows its limitations. Communities struggled to find alternative building approaches that can overcome the rigid, workflow-based logic of Dockerfiles/Containerfiles.

The same community that develops Podman brought to life the Buildah (pronounced build-ah) project, a tool to manage OCI builds with support for multiple building strategies. Images created with Buildah are fully portable and compatible with Docker, and all engines are compliant with the OCI image and runtime specs.

Buildah is an open source project released under the Apache 2.0 license...