Podman Container Engine

Podman is an open-source container engine created by Dan Walsh and the Red Hat team in 2018, providing daemonless container management through a Docker-compatible command-line interface, with features including pod management, rootless containers for non-privileged users, container image building through Containerfiles, image signing, Kubernetes YAML compatibility, systemd integration through quadlet, and remote management through a REST API, designed as a more secure alternative to Docker without a long-running daemon process, with each container running as a child process of the podman command, ensuring containers inherit the permissions of the user who started them, adopted by organizations requiring rootless container security including government agencies and financial institutions. The rootless container support enables unprivileged users to run containers without root access, with the user namespace mapping container root to the host user, and the subordinate user and group mappings providing isolation between container users and host users, enabling safe multi-tenant container deployments on shared infrastructure. The pod support groups related containers that share network, IPC, and user namespaces, mirroring the Kubernetes pod concept, with pods enabling sidecar patterns, shared volumes, and local service discovery. The Kubernetes compatibility enables generating Kubernetes YAML from pods and running pods from Kubernetes YAML. The systemd integration through quadlet. The image building through Containerfiles. The image signing through GPG. The compose support through podman-compose. The remote client for managing containers on other machines. Designed by Dan Walsh and Red Hat. Designed for container developers.