What is Podman Desktop?

With containers being an essential part of software development, how do you manage your containers? And better yet, how do you ensure that your container has applications smoothly moved from your local development environment to Kubernetes? Now, to help simplify some of the complexities of containers. Today we're going to be talking all things about the Podman Desktop project. It's an open source tool that allows us to build, manage and run containers all from our local machine and effectively t

ransition our applications over to Kubernetes and help build your cloud native skill set. Now, my name is Cedric Clyburn. I'm a developer advocate at Red Hat. And let's dive right in. So based on the open source project, Podman, Podman Desktop, takes things a step further, providing a graphical interface for users on Mac, windows, and of course, your favorite distribution of Linux to be able to interact with and manage containers, images, registries, volumes and pods. And as well, you can use it

to install and keep the Pod Man container engine up to date. Now, Pod Desktop allows you to do all sorts of things. For example, work with container files or Docker files in order to build images from your applications, as well as run your containers to be able to debug them and inspect them, as well as use other container engines, for example Docker or Lima, all in one place on your desktop. Now, you might have already heard of Podman before or even use it, but similar to Docker, what Podman d

oes differently is runs by default rootless and daemonless. So running containers as a non-root user with no separate processes running as well. So for example, rootless containers essentially map the user's user ID into a container as root in the user's namespace. And what this does is it really helps with large enterprises that want to adopt container technology and also reduces the attack surface for, say, if a potential attacker was to, breakout from a container, they would only have access

to the user, the non-root user, and their resources and privileges. And what it also does very well is integrates seamlessly into system D, as well as provide some great benefits for SE Linux and much more. But what Podman also does is allow you to natively work with Kubernetes resources such as pods, which is a grouping of one or more containers. Say for example, we've got a web server containerized, and we've got a sidecar monitoring container where these both in a pod, are able to share the s

ame network and storage resources. Now, speaking of Kubernetes, Podman Desktop allows application developers to not only work with just containers, but also Kubernetes resources like for example, pods and deployments. So we don't have to stand up an entire Kubernetes cluster to work with, for example, Kubernetes Yaml. But we can also generate Kubernetes Yaml from existing containers or pods that we have running on Podman Desktop, which is pretty neat. When we're ready, we're able to take that an

d deploy that to a Kubernetes cluster that we're authenticated to. And this in part is helped by the extensions of pod and desktop, which allow us to stand up, for example, Kubernetes clusters that are similar to production in order to develop, test and learn using extensions from open source projects like for example, minikube, which is a single node Kubernetes cluster that's running on our system, as well as Kind, which is Kubernetes that's running inside of a container. And the integration wi

th these plugins and extensions allow us to work with our existing local container images, be able to do testing there, and when ready, we can use our Kubernetes context in order to deploy to a remote Kubernetes cluster. There's also other great extensions, such as the support for compose for multi-container applications and others. For example, such as being able to use our Docker desktop extensions and being able to replicate the Docker socket so our existing tools can also support Podman if t

hey don't already. So Podman desktop was really created to ease some of the developer burdens of working with containers, but also help in the development to deployment process of going from containers to pods to Kubernetes. Now there's a great community out there already, so I highly recommend you check out the project at Podman-desktop.io, or check it out on GitHub. And I've got a question for you. Have you tried Podman or Podman desktop before? Let us know in the comments or tell us what cont

ainer management tool are you working with? As always, thanks so much for watching. If you enjoyed this video, be sure to give it a like and we'll see you in the next video. Thanks for watching! Before you leave, please remember to hit like and subscribe.