# Podman Podman is not a container runtime like Docker, but "only" an implementation of the OCI image specification. - It can't launch containers on its own - It requires a CRI container runtime - It uses containerd which in turns uses runc (or similar) to start containers ## Benefits - Proximity to Docker. Most of the commands can be used against both (login, build, pull, push, tag, etc). Dockerfiles can also be used to build container images - Mostly ok to alias podman for docker - Podman is lean and efficient. Uses less memory and is faster - Podman is now a standard for Linux distributions like Fefora's CoreOS - Podman is available in Ubuntu's default repositories - Podman supports pods - https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2019/01/15/podman-managing-containers-pods - Makes it possible to test K8S deployments without a K8S cluster - Rootless mode: podman does not require root permissions to execute its commands, unlicke Docker which depends on the daemon - Podman follows the fork-exec model. Changes are recorded in the auditd system ## Limitations - Linux based: only runs stably on Linux-based systems - Works under WSL and can be installed on MacOS via homebrow, but not perfect - Docker-compose is supported but Podman can't run multiple containers locally - Alternatives: Podman-Compose, Minikube or k3d