Podman Desktop: A Toolkit for Red Hat Containers

Bret and Matt are joined by Brent Baude and Dan Walsh from Red Hat to talk about the latest with Podman, Quadlet, Podman Desktop and Podman machine, and how it all works with Kubernetes.

Dan Walsh, a Senior Distinguished Engineer at Red Hat, has been working with containers since the beginning. He's a contributor to Docker, Project Atomic, SELinux, and a lot more. He literally wrote the book on Podman.

Brent Baude, is a Senior Principal Software Engineer at Red Hat and an architect and a primary maintainer of Podman, and contributes to many of its associated technologies like CRI-O, Buildah, and Skopeo.

We go through a lot of tooling in this episode because Red Hat has taken a different stance than Docker in how it delivers its container tooling. You might say they take the approach of the Unix philosophy of every program does one thing well. Most of us know Docker and how it bundles many things related to containers into a single command line and daemon, yet some would prefer to isolate pieces of container management functionality into discreet, smaller programs - one for building images, one for running containers, one for communicating with registries, one for adding a GUI to your container manager, and one for managing the container VM. It's just sort of how I would break down the Podman ecosystem.

And while that may seem like a lot of things, it's basically what Docker does for you in a single tool, yet the isolation of these tools is what can make them purpose-fit when you only need a fraction of the functionality of Docker. For example, one of Podman's core tenants is that it tells systemd to run your pods, which is the initialization process on most Linux distributions. In this way, your containers become more like standard system processes, rather than the Docker way of running all containers under the Docker Daemon process itself.

Now many of us have heard of the other two original Red Hat container projects, Skopeo and Buildah, but there's now an increasing number of things the Podman ecosystem can do. So I'm grateful to Dan and Brent for coming on to break down the new parts of this toolkit and how we might use them.

Live recording of the complete show from April 20, 2023 is on YouTube (Ep. #212).

★Topics★
Podman Website
Podman Desktop Website
Dan Walsh's book, Podman in Action
Podman Machine reference
Quadlet Blog Post
Podman and Quadlet Blog Post

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• Bret Fisher - Host
• Cristi Cotovan - Editor
• Beth Fisher - Producer
• Matt Williams - Host
• Brent Baude - Guest
• Dan Walsh - Guest

• (00:00) - Intro
• (04:26) - Dan's history with containers
• (10:52) - The recommended way to get Podman
• (11:55) - Podman Machine
• (13:27) - How is Podman Machine installed
• (16:43) - How is Podman organised
• (19:22) - Podman Compose explained
• (25:21) - Podman Desktop
• (28:52) - Podman and Docker extensions
• (30:16) - Support for Kubernetes YAML
• (36:54) - Podman and systemd workloads
• (42:44) - How to get started with Podman
• (51:38) - Overlaying networks with Podman