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

Choosing our build strategy

There are basically three types of build strategies that we can use with Buildah:

  • Building a container image starting from an existing base image
  • Building a container image starting from scratch
  • Building a container image starting from a Dockerfile

We have already provided an example of the build strategy from an existing base image in the Meet Buildah, Podman's companion section. Since this strategy is pretty similar from a workflow point of view to building from scratch, we will focus our practical examples on the last one, which provides great flexibility to create a small footprint and secure images.

Before going through the various technical details in the next section, let's start exploring all these strategies at a high level.

Even though we can find a lot of prebuilt container images available on the most popular public container registries, sometimes we might not be able to find a particular configuration...