Podman for DevOps

Alessandro Arrichiello, Gianni Salinetti, Brent J. Baude

• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9781803248967
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Intelligence
• Index: Business

Build, deploy, and manage containers with the next-generation engine and toolsKey Features• Discover key differences between Docker and Podman• Build brand new container images with Buildah, the Podman companion• Learn how to manage and integrate containers securely in your existing infrastructureBook DescriptionAs containers have become the new de facto standard for packaging applications and their dependencies, understanding how to implement, build, and manage them is now an essential skill for developers, system administrators, and SRE/operations teams. Podman and its companion tools Buildah and Skopeo make a great toolset to boost the development, execution, and management of containerized applications.Starting with the basic concepts of containerization and its underlying technology, this book will help you get your first container up and running with Podman. You'll explore the complete toolkit and go over the development of new containers, their lifecycle management, troubleshooting, and security aspects. Together with Podman, the book illustrates Buildah and Skopeo to complete the tools ecosystem and cover the complete workflow for building, releasing, and managing optimized container images. Podman for DevOps provides a comprehensive view of the full-stack container technology and its relationship with the operating system foundations, along with crucial topics such as networking, monitoring, and integration with systemd, docker-compose, and Kubernetes.By the end of this DevOps book, you'll have developed the skills needed to build and package your applications inside containers as well as to deploy, manage, and integrate them with system services.What you will learn• Understand Podman's daemonless approach as a container engine• Run, manage, and secure containers with Podman• Discover the strategies, concepts, and command-line options for using Buildah to build containers from scratch• Manage OCI images with Skopeo• Troubleshoot runtime, build, and isolation issues• Integrate Podman containers with existing networking and system servicesWho this book is forThe book is for cloud developers looking to learn how to build and package applications inside containers and system administrators who want to deploy, manage, and integrate them with system services and orchestration solutions. This book provides a detailed comparison between Docker and Podman to aid you in learning Podman quickly.

Section 1: From Theory to Practice: Running Containers with Podman

This chapter will take you through the basic concepts of container technology, the main features of Podman and its companion tools, the main differences between Podman and Docker, and finally, will put the theory of running and managing containers into practice.

This part of the book comprises the following chapters:

• Chapter 1, Introduction to Container Technology
• Chapter 2, Comparing Podman and Docker
• Chapter 3, Running the First Container
• Chapter 4, Managing Running Containers
• Chapter 5, Implementing Storage for the Container’s Data

Chapter 1: Introduction to Container Technology

Container technology has old roots in operating system history. For example, do you know that part of container technology was born back in the 1970s? Despite their simple and intuitive approach, there are many concepts behind containers that deserve a deeper analysis to fully grasp and appreciate how they made their way in the IT industry.

We're going to explore this technology to better understand how it works under the hood, the theory behind it, and its basic concepts. Knowing the mechanics and the technology behind the tools will let you easily approach and learn the whole technology's key concepts.

Then, we will also explore container technology's purpose and why it has spread to every company today. Do you know that 50% of the world's organizations are running half of their application base as containers in production nowadays?

Let's dive into this great technology!

In this chapter, we're going to ask the following questions:

• What are containers?
• Why do I need a container?
• Where do containers come from?
• Where are containers used today?

Technical requirements

This chapter does not require any technical prerequisites, so feel free to read it without worrying about installing or setting up any kind of software on your workstation!

Anyway, if you are new to containers, you will find here many technical concepts useful to understand the next chapters. We recommend going through it carefully and coming back when needed. Previous knowledge of the Linux operating system would be helpful in understanding the technical concepts covered in this book.

Book conventions

In the following chapters, we will learn many new concepts with practical examples that will require active interaction with a Linux shell environment. In the practical examples, we will use the following conventions:

• For any shell command that will be anticipated by the $ character, we will use a standard user (not root) for the Linux system.
• For any shell command that will be anticipated by the # character, we will use the root user for the Linux system.
• Any output or shell command that would be too long to display in a single line for the code block will be interrupted with the \ character, and then it will continue to a new line.

What are containers?

This section describes the container technology from the ground up, beginning from basic concepts such as processes, filesystems, system calls, the process isolation up to container engines, and runtimes. The purpose of this section is to describe how containers implement process isolation. We also describe what differentiates containers from virtual machines and highlight the best use case of both scenarios.

Before asking ourselves what a container is, we should answer another question: what is a process?

According to The Linux Programming Interface, an enjoyable book by Michael Kerrisk, a process is an instance of an executing program. A program is a file holding information necessary to execute the process. A program can be dynamically linked to external libraries, or it can be statically linked in the program itself (the Go programming language uses this approach by default).

This leads us to an important concept: a process is executed in the machine CPU and allocates a portion of memory containing program code and variables used by the code itself. The process is instantiated in the machine's user space and its execution is orchestrated by the operating system kernel. When a process is executed, it needs to access different machine resources such as I/O (disk, network, terminals, and so on) or memory. When the process needs to access those resources, it performs a system call into the kernel space (for example, to read a disk block or send packets via the network interface).

The process indirectly interacts with the host disks using a filesystem, a multi-layer storage abstraction, that facilitates the write and read access to files and directories.

How many processes usually run in a machine? A lot. They are orchestrated by the OS kernel with complex scheduling logics that make the processes behave like they are running on a dedicated CPU core, while the same is shared among many of them.

The same program can instantiate many processes of its kind (for example, multiple web server instances running on the same machine). Conflicts, such as many processes trying to access the same network port, must be managed accordingly.

Nothing prevents us from running a different version of the same program on the host, assuming that system administrators will have the burden of managing potential conflicts of binaries, libraries, and their dependencies. This could become a complex task, which is not always easy to solve with common practices.

This brief introduction was necessary to set the context.

Containers are a simple and smart answer to the need of running isolated process instances. We can safely affirm that containers are a form of application isolation that works on many levels:

• Filesystem isolation: Containerized processes have a separated filesystem view, and their programs are executed from the isolated filesystem itself.
• Process ID isolation: This is a containerized process run under an independent set of process IDs (PIDs).
• User isolation: User IDs (UIDs) and group IDs (GIDs) are isolated to the container. A process' UID and GID can be different inside a container and run with a privileged UID or GID inside the container only.
• Network isolation: This kind of isolation relates to the host network resources, such as network devices, IPv4 and IPv6 stacks, routing tables, and firewall rules.
• IPC isolation: Containers provide isolation for host IPC resources, such as POSIX message queues or System V IPC objects.
• Resource usage isolation: Containers rely on Linux control groups (cgroups) to limit or monitor the usage of certain resources, such as CPU, memory, or disk. We will discuss more about cgroups later in this chapter.

From an adoption point of view, the main purpose of containers, or at least the most common use case, is to run applications in isolated environments. To better understand this concept, we can look at the following diagram:

Figure 1.1 – Native applications versus containerized ones

Applications running natively on a system that does not provide containerization features share the same binaries and libraries, as well as the same kernel, filesystem, network, and users. This could lead to many issues when an updated version of an application is deployed, especially conflicting library issues or unsatisfied dependencies.

On other hand, containers offer a consistent layer of isolation for applications and their related dependencies that ensures seamless coexistence on the same host. ...

Table of contents

• Podman for DevOps
• Foreword
• Preface
• Section 1: From Theory to Practice: Running Containers with Podman
• Chapter 1: Introduction to Container Technology
• Chapter 2: Comparing Podman and Docker
• Chapter 3: Running the First Container
• Chapter 4: Managing Running Containers
• Chapter 5: Implementing Storage for the Container's Data
• Section 2: Building Containers from Scratch with Buildah
• Chapter 6: Meet Buildah – Building Containers from Scratch
• Chapter 7: Integrating with Existing Application Build Processes
• Chapter 8: Choosing the Container Base Image
• Chapter 9: Pushing Images to a Container Registry
• Section 3: Managing and Integrating Containers Securely
• Chapter 10: Troubleshooting and Monitoring Containers
• Chapter 11: Securing Containers
• Chapter 12: Implementing Container Networking Concepts
• Chapter 13: Docker Migration Tips and Tricks
• Chapter 14: Interacting with systemd and Kubernetes
• Other Books You May Enjoy