Podman is an open-source container engine developed by Red Hat, designed for developing, managing, and running containers and container images. It’s a part of the libpod library, and is often seen as a drop-in replacement for Docker, with some key differences.
- Podman is a daemonless container engine that allows you to run containers and pods (groups of containers).
- It uses the same OCI (Open Container Initiative) standards as Docker, meaning you can run the same container images with either.
- Podman can manage pods natively (like in Kubernetes), which groups containers sharing the same network namespace.
- Excellent rootless support out-of-the-box.
- Decentralized; each container runs as its own process.
- Native support for pods, similar to Kubernetes.