So question from novice in containers, podman vs docker why should i consider switching from docker?
- Both docker and podman support rootless containers.
- Rootless podman setup is easier to achieve from experience and it integrates well enough with systemd.
- Docker requires a daemon to run at all times whereas podman doesn't.
- A lot of interesting things are going on with podman ("native" gitlab-runner executor in the works, wsl2 support, among other things)
wsl2 mode is super impressive -- none of the overhead of docker on os x
Are there any good docs/blogs that go into detail on how they’ve managed to avoid that overhead? Would be awesome to learn about
In contrast, yes, wsl2 has 5% CPU hits (hyperv, ...),but a sane FS mapping, so the total overhead is imperceptible for a windows dev box.
I was pleasantly surprised to see wsl2 Just Work. Our only issue preventing wsl2 from being the official team rec over native Linux has been wsl2's lack of opencl, and that's just specific to our use of GPUs. As someone whose preferred dev box has been osx for ~20 years, even when at MS, I was biased against Windows for most dev... but no longer.
VSCodes “Create Remote Dev Container from Repository” functionality has made it even easier. My dev containers have no overlap with the host filesystem so macOS and Windows are equally performant for my use cases :)
Almost all our dev is generic, so that means Windows for Office/web/... and full Linux for dev (except no real OpenCL).
Nvidia punts to IBM RHEL8 docs for GPU podman, which is unusual and risky to see. We officially recommend against it for HA environments due to this kind of lack and overall low relative confidence. I think k8s envs may be moving to something here, so maybe in a year or two? I'd be curious of folks doing stock rhel8 podman with tensorflow/torch on nvidia, which should be as vanilla as you can get for enterprise ai. We generally see more interesting GPU envs here (ex: DGX with advanced networking hw/sw), but we don't have confidence for the simple case, which is the starting point..
I've found this troubleshooting page quite helpful: https://github.com/containers/podman/blob/main/troubleshooti...
It works well enough for single docker images, but I've never gotten it to work well with a complicated docker-compose set-up (I haven't tried in a couple months though, so go check the docs before you write it off).
My complaint with it is that I’d prefer if there was a 100% feature-parity CLI interface so it could run in the background, and that it should be open source.
To have a low-level developer tool that’s required to be in my menubar and administered through a closed-source GUI is IMHO an insane departure from web software development norms. I use lazydocker for now but it should be an official utility that replaces the GUI app.
> To have a low-level developer tool that’s required to be in my menubar and administered through a closed-source GUI is IMHO an insane departure from web software development norms.
Yeah, this is why I mentioned the mac/windows shop part. Desktop is only required on mac/windows. On linux, it's just the cli, which works just fine (it's also free).
Docker desktop works pretty well, and I'm not saying they don't deserve the money, but I'm not going to spend my own money to do enterprise work, so I have to investigate alternatives (minikube and podman worked the best, in my experience).
This changed in the last year, previously docker was free to use personally or at non enterprise scale work/office.
This can be found at the very bottom of that page:
> Docker Desktop can be used for free as part of a Docker Personal subscription for: small companies (fewer than 250 employees AND less than $10 million in annual revenue), personal use, education, and non-commercial open source projects.
podman run -ti --rm --security-opt seccomp=unconfined --security-opt label=disable --cap-add SYS_ADMIN --env STORAGE_DRIVER=vfs quay.io/podman/stable sh -c 'podman run -ti --rm --security-opt seccomp=unconfined --security-opt label=disable --cap-add SYS_ADMIN --env STORAGE_DRIVER=vfs quay.io/podman/stable sh -c "podman run --rm hello-world"'Podman has an almost identical CLI to Docker, and can have a daemon that is fully Docker compatible (thus, all Docker integrations work against it including docker-compose). It is literally a drop-in replacement but it doesn't require your company to buy licenses. So yes, you should if you can.
IBM/RHEL seem to be the effective the stewards of Podman, and are using their monopoly-like position in enterprise OS segments to take control of the virtualization layer through it. This is similar but worse to old MS/Windows doing tricks for IE vs others. Supporting Podman is supporting explicitly anti-competitive IBM/RHEL OSS behavior for enterprise, utility, & gov environments.
Everything Red Hat produces is open source (except the branded offerings, which are derived from the OSS upstreams). They charge for support. If you don't want support, use the OSS upstreams. What lock-in are you explicitly pointing to? Because I have no idea what you mean by taking "control of the virtualization layer".
Also, I should note that Nutanix and VMWare are a thing but again I am unclear at what unethical behavior you are actually pointing to at Red Hat. I am only responding to a shaky interpretation of what I think you are pointing to.
Yeah sure OSS in theory and IBM is a free entity. But for the same freedom, I am free to call from for divesting from any use of IBM/RHEL products and consultants in enterprise and gov contracts as no longer a trusted and ethical partner due to their anti-competitive self-dealing at the clear expense of the community & customer. RHEL lost neutrality & HA credibility as an infra layer and IBM as a partner through this. Nothing personal, just business and trying to protect our users, same as the RHEL org's actions helping themselves.
Can you clarify what you mean by swapping their race horse? What is the horse being swapped?
Where this gets problematic for a commonly "single-sourced" infrastructure technology in regulated envs is IBM/RHEL also prevented docker from making it into the RHEL 8 repos. Podman was obviously technically deficient as a critical infra replacement due to immaturity like many unimplemented compatibility APIs, yet it was marketed as compatible and instead of offering both until the community could prove it out etc, RHEL8 didn't include docker. NBD for people doing redhat at home or whatever easy environments, but if you're doing something like bringing AI to important societal problems at big world-reaching orgs, having to go outside the main repos can be a major drain on time, staff, budget, and even an existential risk. This is the kind of BigCo malfeasance we're supposed to be moving away from by promoting Linux, OSS, and containers.
RHEL8 felt like a repeat of IE vs Firefox but now for RHEL (main sponsor of Podman) vs Docker, and much worse. It's one thing if docker was never there or containers were removed, but this was replacing with a binary-incompatible tool under their effective control and marketing to security-critical customers (and on hackernews) as a safe and ready replacement. So we also burnt time diagnosising people were trying to use broken podman tech because that's all RHEL gave them and tricked them into thinking was appropriate.