Podman vs Docker: What are the differences?

Podman and its Daemonless Approach?

Podman is an open-source container engine project that helps us with developing, managing, and deploying containers. What makes Podman special is its daemonless approach.

• With Docker, when we work with the Docker CLI, we're actually interacting with the Docker daemon, which runs in the background to handle tasks for us.
• Podman, however, is different; instead of using a background daemon to manage and create containers, it does everything on the client side by forking itself, and this child process becomes the container.

This makes Podman more secure and lightweight compared to Docker's architecture.

Avoid Single Point of Failure Using Podman

The daemonless approach also helps in another way. Let's think, for some reason, the Docker engine running in the background crashes or becomes unresponsive. In this situation, we lose access to Docker containers and anything else attached to the Docker engine. This is called a single point of failure, which we can avoid with Podman, making it unique due to its daemonless approach.

Root vs Rootless

Let's imagine a scenario where we run our application as root on our computer. If this application is affected by a bug or vulnerability, a hacker could use it to access the entire system since it's running as root.

However, if we run the same application as a regular user, even if it has a bug, the hacker would not have access to the entire system, only the user's space would be affected. This approach, called rootless, adds another layer of security.

This is another difference between Docker and Podman: Docker runs the Docker daemon in the background as root, whereas Podman's daemonless approach allows containers to run as a user rather than as root.

Docker and Podman: Similarities

In general, you may notice some similarities between Docker and Podman because both are based on something called OCI, which stands for Open Container Initiative.

OCI sets standards for how we work with container technologies, which is why many commands are the same in Docker and Podman.

Conclusion

In this article, we explained some key concepts and the differences between Docker and Podman.