Podman

Podman is an open source container engine and desktop app that runs rootless, daemonless containers, hosted by the CNCF under the Linux Foundation.

Podman starts containers straight from its command line, with no manager daemon running in the background. That design lowers resource use at idle and improves security. Containers can also run rootless, locked down to the privileges of the user who launched them. Podman Container Tools, the collection of Podman, Buildah and Skopeo, was accepted to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation on 21 January 2025 at the Sandbox maturity level. The CNCF is part of the Linux Foundation, and with the Podman 6.0 release the code moved to a GitHub organization the CNCF owns. The engine builds images from an unmodified Dockerfile or Containerfile, reuses cached layers on rebuilds, and gathers builds for several architectures into one manifest list. It pulls images from Docker Hub, Quay, an internal registry or a vendor, and pushes them to several registries. Pods group containers the way Kubernetes does. Podman plays Kubernetes YAML directly, generates YAML from a pod and deploys to an existing cluster. The --gpus option hands NVIDIA and AMD devices to a container. Podman Desktop is the graphical application for Windows, macOS and Linux, where Compose applications and local Kind or Minikube clusters are managed, and Buildah and Skopeo are developed in the same collection. The natural users are developers who want a Docker-compatible engine without a background service, and teams carrying existing Docker containers and docker-compose files across. It fits a single developer on a laptop as well as a company that standardizes its desktops. Security-minded organizations can run every container rootless. Their administrators can lock Podman Desktop settings with a managed configuration that users cannot override, down to default and blocked registries. Podman is open source under the Apache License 2.0, and help comes from its community on Discord, Matrix and GitHub. One common path starts with an image built from a project's Containerfile, run beside its database in a single pod. That pod is then exported as Kubernetes YAML and tried on a Kind cluster created in Podman Desktop, before it reaches a shared cluster. In continuous integration, GitHub Actions supports Podman, Buildah and Skopeo, so the build that ran on the laptop runs on the runner too. Podman Desktop also connects to Docker, Lima and Red Hat OpenShift, so one window can watch every engine on a mixed workstation. The result is one set of container tools for the path from a developer's laptop to Kubernetes.