Alessandro Arrichiello - Podman for DevOps: Containerization reimagined with Podman and its companion tools

Containerization reimagined with Podman and its companion tools

Alessandro Arrichiello

Gianni Salinetti

BIRMINGHAMMUMBAI

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To my son, Giovanni, for allowing me to steal time from our playtime. To my wife, Tecla, for being my loving partner and supporting me.

Alessandro Arrichiello

To my son, Filippo, who teaches me to learn every day and enjoy the little things in life. To my beloved wife, Anna Veronica, for all the strength and inspiration she brings to our family.

Gianni Salinetti

Containers, their various runtimes, and Kubernetes are seeing fierce momentum in the technology and computing worlds. They are no longer just the darling of system administrators and Kubernetes distributed workloads. Containers are now endemic in Continuous Integration (CI) tasks, cloud workloads, and microservices. Starting with programmers, containers have even broken into the desktop space, where Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) can be the backend into containers for things such as testing language versions or compiling code. We can attribute the latest invigoration to the simplification of container images and the ability to distribute them in container registries. Not bad for a decades-old technology that used to simply focus on the isolation of a computing process.

Podman for DevOps begins with a detailed exploration of container history, from its inception to now. It then transitions into the various container technologies and arrives at the two most common ones: Docker and Podman (short for Pod Manager). The early chapters provide a comprehensive examination of Docker and Podman and describe the pros and cons of both. These comparisons demonstrate Podman's novelty and strengths.

Gianni and Alessandro then settle on Podman, beginning with an exploration of its architecture. They then follow the architecture by illustrating the various applications in the Podman stack, such as conmon and network tooling. After laying the groundwork for how Podman works, they meticulously review each Podman command in an example-oriented approach. Finally, Gianni and Alessandro provide a thorough review of Buildah, Podman's best friend and a best-of-breed application for building container images.

When I write about containers and Podman, one of my challenges when explaining concepts can be providing too many details or oversimplifying things. Gianni and Alessandro have found a perfect medium between both ends by supplying ample amounts of detail. I appreciated the carefully crafted explanations when the topic required them. Not only was the level of detail appropriate, but they also used a very wide scope when writing about Podman and containers. As I read the book, I was able to relate to their superb use of examples and they did not add layers of abstraction that can make learning difficult. Podman for DevOps was a pleasure to read. As a subject matter expert, I am certain it will be a perfect resource for those both new to and experienced with Podman and containers.

Brent J. Baude, Senior Principal Software Engineer

Podman Architect

Alessandro Arrichiello is a solution architect for Red Hat Inc. with a special focus on telco technologies. He has a passion for GNU/Linux systems, which began at age 14 and continues today. He has worked with tools for automating enterprise IT: configuration management and continuous integration through virtual platforms. Alessandro is also a writer for the Red Hat Developer Blog, on which he has authored several articles about container architecture and technology. He now helps telecommunication customers with adopting container orchestration environments such as Red Hat OpenShift and Kubernetes, infrastructure as a service such as OpenStack, edge computing, and data center automation.

Gianni Salinetti is a solution architect from Rome working for Red Hat Inc. with a special focus on cloud-native computing and hybrid cloud strategies. He started working with GNU/Linux back in 2001 and developed a passion for open source software. His main fields of interest are application orchestration, automation, and systems performance tuning. He is also an advocate of DevSecOps and GitOps practices. He is a former Red Hat instructor, having taught many classes about GNU/Linux, OpenStack, JBoss middleware, Ansible, Kubernetes, and Red Hat OpenShift. He won Red Hat EMEA awards as the best DevOps, cloud, and middleware instructor. He is also an author for the Red Hat Developer Blog and actively contributes to webinars and events.

Nicol Amato has over 20 years of experience working in the field of IT, 16 of which were at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Accenture, DXC, and Red Hat Inc. Working in both technical and development roles has given him a broad base of skills and the ability to work with a diverse range of clients. His time was spent designing and implementing complex infrastructures for clients with the aim to migrate traditional services to hybrid, multi-cloud, and edge environments, evolving them into cloud-native services. He is enthusiastic about new technologies and he likes to be up to date in particular with open source, which he considers one of the essences of technology that regulates the evolution of information technology.

Pierluigi Rossi is a solution architect for Red Hat Inc. His passion for GNU/Linux systems began 20 years ago and continues today. He has built a strong business and technical know-how on enterprise and cutting-edge technologies, working for many companies on different verticals and roles in the last 20 years. He has worked with virtualization and containerization tools (open source and not). He has also participated in several projects for corporate IT automation. He is now working on distributed on-premises and cloud environments involving IaaS, PaaS (OpenShift and Kubernetes), and automation. He loves open source in all its shades, and he enjoys sharing ideas and solutions with customers, colleagues, and community members.