Does Podman have a swarm counterpart, or does running services still effectively require configuring systemd and then switching to kubernetes for multi-machine?
Podman can work with local pods, using the same yaml as for K8s. Not quite docker swarm, but useful for local testing IME when k8s is the eventual target.
Docker Compose is really great for multi-container deployments on a single machine. And Docker Swarm takes that same Compose specification (although there were historical differences) and brings it over to clusters, all while remaining similarly simple. I'm surprised that ourside of Docker Swarm, Nomad or lightweight Kubernetes distros like K3s there haven't been that many attempts at simple clustering solutions. Even then, Kubernetes (which Podman supports) ends up being more complex.
Can you provide any documentation about that?
https://docs.podman.io/en/latest/markdown/podman-system-serv...
In places where you're doing a `dnf install podman` all you typically need to do is start the service and then point either the podman cli or docker cli directly at it. In Fedora for example it's podman.service.
I honestly prefer using the official docker cli when talking to podman.