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Docker is dead? Podman – an alternative tool?

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Re: Docker is dead? Podman – an alternative tool?

#151

Rootless podman is my first choice for using containers now, it works fantastically well in my experience. It's so much nicer to have all my container related stuff like volumes, configs, the control socket, etc. in my home directory and standard user paths vs. scattered all over the system. Permission issues with bind mounts just totally disappear when you go rootless. It's so much easier and better than the root pr…

What about UID issues? I remember using it years ago and sometimes having permission issues in containers when mounting local files. How is that nowadays? I much prefer running this in a rootless manner also. What about docker compose? Is there an alternative for podman?

Nah no good alternative yet, I tried running my docker compose file which works perfectly with docker in podman compose and it failed outright.

Re: Docker is dead? Podman – an alternative tool?

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The rate limits were mostly in place to deny corporate CI users access to the Hub free of charge and force them to pay or deploy a mirror. What I never understood is why they didn’t just properly handle this with mirrors like any package manager does; why is this a problem for docker, but not for yum / apt / etc? I have to admit that these rate limits have accelerated my migration to alternatives like quay.io

Docker is a for-profit company. The question wasn't "how do we ensure that this stays available?" but "how do we make money from this?".

To that I say that Docker is a great example of terrible choices on how to monetize their technology, this being one of them.

Re: Docker is dead? Podman – an alternative tool?

#153
post #56

OCI compatible containers are the future, docker and podman both classify as such. https://opencontainers.org/ That being said, docker blows. Docker desktop blows more. Docker desktop on Windows blows the most. I always get stuck with a bind mount misbehaving, or some other issue that requires me to wipe the docker desktop data to fix it. Just use docker compose for simple stuff, and stay away from docker for Windows…

On the Docker for Windows note, it's not podman but after I had trouble with their "forced upgrade unless enterprise" policy (which made me update to a broken version with a known issue they didn't solve for weeks) I switched to Rancher Desktop and never looked back. You get all the things (docker CLI, docker-compose, kubernetes via k3s) but it's FOSS and it doesn't feel like they're trying to shove a premium plan do…

Loving Rancher Desktop here too, and even w/o making use of k3s at all. Fantastic drop-in replacement for Docker Desktop w/o the garbage.

Re: Docker is dead? Podman – an alternative tool?

#154
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s podman-compose which does what you want, but is a community maintained script. There’s also the ability for podman to run as a system service, and provide an OCI compatible container API. This then integrates seamlessly with the actual docker-compose. See: https://www.redhat.com/sysadmin/podman-docker-compose

You can point the official docker-compose at podman now! I do that! It's 99.999% compatible as the podman people basicaly reimplemented all the docker daemon APIs. It sometimes lags a bit behind, because sometime docker implements new stuff... But for usage with docker-compose it has worked flawlessly for me. EDIT: you can also export the podman unix socket via socat, i also tried it to run a rootless docker runtime…

I tried podman compose quite a few months ago with my docker compose file and it failed, what is the difference between doing that and this?

So like, you can use docker compose for podman instead of docker, instead of something like podman compose?

Re: Docker is dead? Podman – an alternative tool?

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not that it wasn't usable previously, you'd just run into a few issues. I don't like that definition of "usable". Compose v2.0 compatibility became available only since last month which was very late. If podman isn't for technical benefit, is this all about political decision for RH to govern container ecosystem on their own instead of dealing with docker?

Podman has a few tricks up its sleeve that Docker can't do. Among other things: - `--rootfs` lets you start a container from a directory instead of an image - You can configure alternate container storage locations, e.g. to share a common library of container images among multiple machines over NFS - As previously mentioned, it has the k8s-like notion of "pods" which are multiple containers sharing namespaces with ea…

Sounds nice and all but I really liked docker compose for setting up containers, I'll have to find out if podman has full docker compose support yet, then maybe I'll switch.

Last time I tested it, it had some downsides, but "last time" was like at the start of this year so things maybe might have improved since then.

Re: Docker is dead? Podman – an alternative tool?

#156

Personally, i still find Docker to be the easiest way to get containers up and running - everything from Dockerfiles, building images (caching aside), to running them with Docker Compose, Docker Swarm or even Kubernetes with Docker as the runtime. Why? Docker - one of the older and most popular runtimes for OCI, with all of the tooling you might possibly want; most of the problems are known and solutions are easy to…

I'm not switching just yet because I don't know if podman fully supports docker compose yet.

Re: Docker is dead? Podman – an alternative tool?

#157
post #100
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kind of a weird take, to be honest. If containerization is not security, them not running as root should be an absolutely critical first step for managing risk.

>If containerization is not security Call it less secure than VMs if you prefer that wording. >not running as root should be an absolutely critical first step for managing risk. Kinda depends on what angle you come at it from risk management. You could take something less secure (containers) and try to tweak it to meet whatever level of residual risk you deem acceptable. Or you could just jump straight to VM and bene…

The "if" was not meant to indicate I doubted you. I agree. It was to indicate a prior in the sense of "if this is true, this other thing should also be true).

VMs are also not a foolproof solution to operational security. It depends entirely on your risk appetite. If you're going to run containers, you should run them with as little permissions as you can. Hence, rootless.

Re: Docker is dead? Podman – an alternative tool?

#158
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's apparently a 'podman play kube' command that can take some k8s yaml like pod descriptions and instantiate them directly: https://docs.podman.io/en/latest/markdown/podman-play-kube.1... I hadn't heard of this until now but it sounds pretty nifty!

> There's apparently a 'podman play kube' command that can take some k8s yaml like pod descriptions and instantiate them directly Wow that's a heck of a killer feature. Once Podmam implements a replacement for Docker's docker swarm, Docker is effectively deprecated.

I honestly wouldn't put much faith in swarm being viable for long. Mirantis basically stopped working on it before they broke docker apart. The current docker company seems much more focused on developer experience tooling, not distributed systems. There are some longstanding swarm issues and bugs, particularly with changing configurations or one time jobs, that will probably never be fixed. I'd go straight to kubernetes and skip swarm personally. Stuff like k3s make kubernetes much easier to deploy at a small scale. Or I'd look at Hashi's nomad if something about k8s was really a blocker.

Re: Docker is dead? Podman – an alternative tool?

#159
post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also: > Instead of free use of Docker Desktop until now, this software suite is now available for rent after the transition phase until the end of January 2022, starting at $5 per user/month, provided it is for professional use. > Here, Docker Desktop includes the Docker Engine, docker-cli, docker-compose and a credential helper, among others. At least docker-compose (and probably also docker service + cli, since it…

Yeah, the main benefit of docker desktop is packaging up a nice Linux VM on Mac/Windows, plus some UI features. There’s a reason ’Docker Desktop for Linux’ came so much later.

Dunno, I think WSL2 is actually better on that front. Just do the super secure "curl get.docker.com|bash" in it and you're golden. Even better UX then docker desktop if you specifically don't want a GUI

Re: Docker is dead? Podman – an alternative tool?

#160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Podman has a few tricks up its sleeve that Docker can't do. Among other things: - `--rootfs` lets you start a container from a directory instead of an image - You can configure alternate container storage locations, e.g. to share a common library of container images among multiple machines over NFS - As previously mentioned, it has the k8s-like notion of "pods" which are multiple containers sharing namespaces with ea…

Sounds nice and all but I really liked docker compose for setting up containers, I'll have to find out if podman has full docker compose support yet, then maybe I'll switch. Last time I tested it, it had some downsides, but "last time" was like at the start of this year so things maybe might have improved since then.

4.1 fully supports both the old 1.x Python versions of Compose and the new 2.x Go versions of it - you need to use the docker CLI if you want 2.x though.
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