Podman Playground

What are containers?

Containers are isolated environments for running applications. They hold the application code and all the required dependencies and configurations. Each container is logically isolated from the other containers, and the host system. When an app in one container misbehaves, the damage is usually limited to that container alone, and it does not spread to the other apps, or the host system.

A container also helps with portability. That is, once you create a container, it should work pretty much the same way in any environment. For example, a container that works on Ubuntu 22.04 should also work on Ubuntu 20.04, or an entirely different operating system, like Debian, Red Hat, or CentOS. This helps developers "package once" and "run anywhere".

Container Engines

Container engines are tools that help users create container images, upload images to a central server, start and stop containers, manage networking between containers, and so on. These engines often come in layers, where higher-level tools delegate instructions to lower-level tools. For example, when Docker receives a command to start a container, it delegates this task to a component called runC. runC then takes care of creating and actually starting that container.

Podman

Podman is a daemonless container engine that provides users with a command line interface to work with containers. Podman provides commands that are very familiar to people who previously worked with Docker, as it uses the same syntax. Podman manages the entire container ecosystem including working with images, volumes, running or stopping containers, and even creating Pods. Pods are a way for grouping multiple containers into a single execution environment. You can think of it as a "container for (multiple) containers"; helpful when you want these to run "closer together" and share some resources more efficiently. For example, you could group an Nginx container with a MySQL container so that a web application can read from and write to the database more easily/faster.

Podman also provides a RESTFul API service for managing containers and provides a Podman client to interact with this service.

Podman Playground

In this playground you’re provided with Podman already installed on the CentOS 8 operating system so that you can begin practicing immediately. No additional setup or configuration is required, you only need a KodeKloud Pro subscription and then you can access a Podman-ready environment using your web browser.