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I ditched Docker for Podman

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Re: I ditched Docker for Podman

#651

Post by citizenpaul »

strken wrote: post #580
flyinglizard wrote: post #489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's not because of that. It's because: 1. You want to control spend - there are budgets. 2. You want to control accounting - minimize the number of vendors you work with. Each billing needs to come with an invoice, these need to be managed, when a developer leaves you need to cancel their seat etc. It's a pain. 3. You want to control compliance - are these tools safe? Are they accessing sensitive data? Are they…

If you've got 30 developers then you've probably got, what, five or six teams? Your tech leads/senior engineers/whoever provides tech leadership at a team level are operating at a scale where they can go to the pub with your head of engineering/CTO/each other/the dude from finance who has a credit card and fit around a table. I've worked at companies that size and the "war" involved putting time in the calendar of th…

Obviously all of this is far from universal. I've worked at places that just gave me a card with $500-$1000mo limit for whatever I need. I've worked at a place when I asked for $100 of hard drive space to test something out of production they said find another way.

Re: I ditched Docker for Podman

#652

Post by mixmastamyk »

rglover wrote: post #369
TrainedMonkey wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Containers and container orchestrators are complex tools. The constant cost of using them is pretty high compared to bash scripts. However the scale / maintenance factor is significantly lower, so for a 100 boxes simplicity of bash scripts might still win out over the containers. At 1000 machines it is highly likely that simplest and least maintenance overall solution will be using an orchestrator.

That's what I found out, though: the footprint doesn't matter. I did have to write a simple orchestration system, but it's literally just me provisioning a VPS, bootstrapping it with deps, and pulling the code/installing its dependencies. Short of service or hardware limits, this can work for an unlimited number of servers. I get the why most people think they need containers, but it really seems only suited for hype…

Sounds like you reinvented ansible?

Re: I ditched Docker for Podman

#653

Post by sc68cal »

osigurdson wrote: post #106
sc68cal wrote: post #57

I have been running Podman in production for a number of years now, and have been very happy with the results. Podman pods have been super useful, and the nature of my workload is such that we just run a full pod on every host, so it's actually removed the need for an orchestrator like Kubernetes. I manage everything via Ansible and it has been great.

Why not just use Kubernetes?

My workload is not dynamic

Re: I ditched Docker for Podman

#654

Post by esseph »

jayd16 wrote: post #272
coffeecoders wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There isn't anything really. The WSL backend is the pain point, which doesn't go away with Docker or Podman or anything else.

I actually mean windows kernel containers so I don't think wsl is involved. Windows server can run them without docker but for local dev I'm not sure what the alternative is.

Just.. run linux for those?

Re: I ditched Docker for Podman

#655

Post by vermaden »

chuckadams wrote: post #406
vermaden wrote: post #380

I ditched Docker and Podman for FreeBSD Jails :) More here: - https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2023/06/28/freebsd-jails-cont... - https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2025/04/11/freebsd-jails-secu... - https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2025/04/08/are-freebsd-jails-... - https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2024/11/22/new-jless-freebsd-...

That's ... a lot of setup. Does FreeBSD have anything similar to containerd?

Check BastilleBSD https://bastillebsd.org/ along with Rocinante - https://bastillebsd.org/rocinante/rocinante/ from here.

Re: I ditched Docker for Podman

#656

Post by vermaden »

udev4096 wrote: post #390
vermaden wrote: post #380

I ditched Docker and Podman for FreeBSD Jails :) More here: - https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2023/06/28/freebsd-jails-cont... - https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2025/04/11/freebsd-jails-secu... - https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2025/04/08/are-freebsd-jails-... - https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2024/11/22/new-jless-freebsd-...

How is that any different than running VMs on a linux host?

Because containers are not virtual machines - You can run 1000 FreeBSD Jails on your laprop while you will not be able to run 1000 VMs - Jails are a lot lighter on resources then VMs.

Re: I ditched Docker for Podman

#657

Post by giamma »

ehaughee wrote: post #167
giamma wrote: post #138

I am still on an x86 Mac. When Docker Desktop changed licensing I tried to switch to Podman and it was a disaster, Podman was brand new and despite many blog posts that claimed it was the perfect replacement it did not work for me, and I have very simple requirements. So I ended up using Rancher Desktop instead, which was also very unstable but better. Fast forward 1 year, Rancher was pretty good and Podman still did…

I also had issues with Podman on an M2 Mac. I'm currently using OrbStack as I had network performance issues with Colima (I have 10GbE between the Mac and a NAS). Outside that issue, Colima was awesome.

Thanks, I did not know OrbStack, will give it a try.

Re: I ditched Docker for Podman

#658

Post by rollcat »

sroerick wrote: post #427
ttul wrote: post #415

Back in 2001/2002, I was charged with building a WiFi hotspot box. I was a fan of OpenBSD and wanted to slim down our deployment, which was running on Python, to avoid having to copy a ton of unnecessary files to the destination systems. I also wanted to avoid dependency-hell. Naturally, I turned to `chroot` and the jails concept. My deployment code worked by running the software outside of the jail environment and m…

The best CI/CD pipeline I ever used was my first freelance deployment using Django. I didn't have a clue what I was doing and had to phone a friend. We set up a git post receive hook which built static files and restarted httpd on a git receive. Deployment was just 'git push live master'. While I've used Docker a lot since then, that remains the single easiest deployment I've ever had. I genuinely don't understand wh…

> God forbid, OpenBSD

What exactly is your problem with OpenBSD? Shaming it completely out of context is kinda mean - they're the upstream for OpenSSH and LibreSSL.

Re: I ditched Docker for Podman

#659

Post by nunez »

bsder wrote: post #462
nunez wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I presume that the bulk of your issues are with container images that start their PID 1s as root. Podman is rootless by default, so this causes problems. What you can do if you don't want to use Docker and don't want to maintain these images yourself is have two Podman machines running: one in rootful mode and another in rootless mode. You can, then, use the `--connection` global flag to specify the machine you want…

Is there a blog post on this somewhere? I'd really love to read more about it beyond just the official documentation.

I made a blog post some years ago about how to create your own VMs with Lima: https://blog.carlosnunez.me/post/docker-desktop-alternative-...

You can also use this to create a VM for Podman that runs on Fedora, rootful by default: https://github.com/carlosonunez/bash-dotfiles/blob/main/lima...

If you go the Lima approach, use `podman system connection add` to add rootful and rootless VMs, then use the `--connection` flag to specify which you want to use. You can alias them to make that easier; for instance, use `alias podman=podman` for rootless stuff (assuming the rootless VM is your default) nad `alias rpodman=podman --connection rootful` for rootful stuff. I'll write a post describing how to set all of that up soon!

Re: I ditched Docker for Podman

#660

Post by nunez »

figmert wrote: post #609
nunez wrote: post #189

I started working at Red Hat this past year, so obviously all Podman, all day long. It's a super easy switch. I moved to using Containerfiles in my LinkedIn courses as well, if for no other reason than it having a much more "open" naming convention! Rootless works great, though there are some (many) images that will need to be tweaked out of the box. Daemonless works great as well. You can still mount podman.sock lik…

Docker compose works fine with podman via its socket.

Correct.
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