We were just pointed to this post Building Container Images with Podman and Buildah by Puja Abbassi on the Giant Swarm site. In the article Puja goes over how Podman and Buildah handle daemonless and rootless building processes. A tardy link on this site, but worth a read!
Dan Walsh has another blog post on the Red Hat Enable Sysadmin site this time he's writing about 6 guides on making containers secure. It's a quick article with pointers to other blog posts showing how to secure your containers.
Jack Wallen has a blog post on the THENEWSTACK site with a great introduction on how to Deploy a Pod on CentOS with Podman. In the post, Jack talks about how Podman fits in the Red Hat ecosystem and then walks you through the fundamentals of creating and running a pod using Podman.
Brent Baude has another blog post on the Red Hat Enable Sysadmin site this time it's all about How to run Podman on Windows with WSL2. If you want to know how to run Podman on Windows 10, this article will show you how.
Over the holiday break, a number of great posts were added to a number of sites that filled up my Twitter feed, so I thought I'd throw together a quick block with links to the highlights from the past month:
If you follow the traffic on IRC (#podman on libera.chat) or GitHub from the developers of libpod, you might have seen us referencing a new API. We often referred to it as apiv2 and for about a month, there has been an 'apiv2' branch for libpod on GitHub. This week, we have begun to merge that branch but have yet to “wire it up.”
First and foremost, the Golang libpod API remains largely unchanged. What is changing is the API we expose for automation and remote usage. Our previous API was based on the varlink protocol. But we heard from users that varlink was a hurdle for libpod adoption especially for those who were using the Docker API and its bindings. They simply could not or did not want to rewrite their custom applications for libpod’s new, varlink-based API.
Over the last 10 years I've seen machines and workflows evolve where I work. From the initial dedicated server, to hpc environments and now the latest instance, containers.
From an admin point of view this is great - The initial servers had to be carefully built and maintained so that everything would work nicely together. Incompatible programs at that time were run through a VM until such time as they could be folded in to the mix.
The HPC's had versioned software and environment modules and were built to load the relevant dependencies at run time.
Now we are into a new era, containers - and not just any old containers, but containers that end users can build and run up fairly quickly to perform what-if's, and move on quickly through iterations until they perform the required functions.
Podman has developed very rapidly and is incredibly easy to use. You can use it in conjunction with quay.io or run it on a local machine.
I should add that Adrian Reber gave a talk and has also created a Podman article using openhpc; well worth a watch and a read.
If you don't have a RedHat Developer Subscription now is an ideal time to get one:
..and download RedHat Enterprise 8.1
Podman version 1.7 is coming out soon and will include new features that will make management of containers with systemd services even easier. Valentin Rothberg has a blog post on the Red Hat Enable Sysadmin site that previews the features: Running containers with Podman and shareable systemd services. In the post Valentin goes over the highlights and then gives a great working example.
Do you want to know how to setup RHEL 8 to run containers using Podman? Xuegang Jin has a blog post on the Red Hat Blog about this very subject, Working with Linux containers on RHEL 8 with Podman, image builder and web console. In the post Xuegang explains how you can use Image Builder to create an OS image, how to run containers with Podman, and how to check the host and containers performance using Web Console.
Do you run containers as root, or as a regular user? Scott McCarty has a blog post on the Red Hat Blog about this very subject, Understanding root inside and outside a container. In the post Scott walks you through what a rootless container does and how it can be a safer alternative to a container run by root.