Why Choose Podman for Containerization?
Nov. 10, 2025, 8:29 p.m.
When publishing a site, it is better to always (or close to always) be running. There’s power outages, earthquakes, the upgrade didn’t take, dropped packets, cosmic rays-- the list is practically endless. A solution to this can be in the form of containerization. Containerizing allows for some neat-o burrito features. Containerization can help in bringing the system back up automatically if it ever goes down. It isolates processes so that if intrusions do happen theyhave a higher likelihood of being isolated rather than having full system access. I believe it has more functionality than this but I’m already sold.
Two main solutions for containerization are Docker and Podman. Docker is very well-known, but I like Podman over docker for a few reasons. First, Podman has rootless functionality. As I discovered, you generally don’t want to give users root privileges as they then can do whatever with your machine. So rootless functionality was a big plus for security. Podman is FOSS (free and open source). As you may have guessed from reading previous entries, I love open source technologies. Another reason I like Podman is that it is daemonless. Daemons are processes that run continuously in the background. This means applications using daemons can use more resources than a daemonless application which runs each process only when needed. Additionally, I have seen multiple sources for potential security vulnerabilities that can happen with daemons. And that sounds like you’reback at giving unprivileged users root level access.
If you’ve decided that you, too, want to try out Podman, then these are the install instructions I followed:
https://aliefee.page/blog/post/install-podman-desktop-on-debian-without-flatpak
What I particularly liked about these instructions was the clarity. I sat down one day, followed the instructions, and was up and running quickly so that I could continue on with my day. Even picked up a couple of lessons from going through the motions. This is a refreshing experience, as I am accustomed to switching back and forth between documentation or guides that do not fully explain the process, which can lead to a lot of frustration and wasted time. The deciding factor when learning a new tool can often be the support resources available.