Podman¹ is a daemonless container engine for developing, managing, and running OCI Containers on your Linux System. Containers can either be run as root or in rootless mode. Simply put: alias docker=podman. The Open Container Initiative (OCI)² is an open governance structure to create open industry standards around container formats and runtimes, which Podman follows. Podman can also create container pods that work together, resembling Kubernetes pods, which it can also make a compatible export for.

Podman uses Buildah³ as underlying container builder, which is a CLI tool that facilitates building both Docker and OCI container images interactively or automatically. Furthermore, the daemonless feature is facilitated by a Fork/Exec model using runc⁴ or crun⁵, which removes the need to give developers full privileges to work on the deployment containers. Since this is the preferred gateway for attackers on a system running a Docker Daemon, Podman makes a safer directly interchangeable alternative. ⁶

About group 96

We are a group of students who are interested in containerization and learning the Go language. We will write four essays on Podman and work on contributing to a set of open issues. Listed below are the logistics of our work process:

Meetings

• Retrospective and Planning meeting - Tuesday @ 15:45 - 18:00 CET (online/offline/hybrid)
• Lab and open collaboration meeting - Friday @ 13:45 - 17:00 CET (online/offline/hybrid)

Forms of communication

• Mattermost - general communication
• Teams - draft document storage and video conferencing

References