Understanding the Podman Internals

Podman is a daemonless container engine for running and managing OCI containers on Linux. Although it is a native Linux tool, Podman can also be used on other operating systems:

On Windows, Podman runs using the Windows Subsystem for Linux.

On macOS, Podman utilizes a Linux VM.

Podman vs Docker

Podman was created to be an alternative to Docker. It bears many similarities to the popular containerization tool, but it also differs in some important aspects.

• Podman is daemonless, unlike Docker, which uses a client-server paradigm. While Docker needs a daemon process to maintain the connection between the client and the server, Podman is a single main process with containers as child processes.

• Due to its architecture, Docker requires root privileges. Podman is rootless by design.

• Docker is a monolithic platform that strives to be an all-in-one solution for container management. Podman, on the other side, focuses on running containers. It utilizes specialized tools for other functionalities - for example, it uses Buildah for building images, and skopeo for image management and distribution.

Join in and Learn from Brent what happens behind the scenes of a rootless Podman container.