Podman in Production
Containers, Orchestration, and Observability with Podman.
The practitioner's guide to running containers in production with Podman: its daemonless, rootless architecture, systemd and Quadlet orchestration, health checks and self-healing, and observability with OpenTelemetry. 333 pages, written for engineers who already ship with containers.
Secure checkout via Polar · PDF + examples archive + free updates for the Podman 6.x line.
Written against the source, not the marketing.
Grounded in the source
Researched against the Podman, Buildah, Skopeo, and Netavark source trees. Where the documentation and the code disagree, the code wins, and the book tells you where they parted ways.
Every example was run
Every command ran on real Podman 6 systems, including an ephemeral k3s cluster for the Kubernetes comparison. The transcripts in the book are real output, not idealized snippets.
Honest about the limits
The book deploys the same application on Quadlet, Docker Swarm, Nomad, and Kubernetes, with a straight answer about where Podman's story ends and a cluster orchestrator's begins.
Seven parts, twenty-five chapters.
From container primitives to a production deployment and a four-way orchestrator comparison. Expand a part to see its chapters.
What this book assumes, and how to read it
Part 1 Foundations 4 chapters
- 1 Why Podman
- 2 Linux Container Primitives
- 3 Installation and Configuration
- 4 Rootless Containers
Part 2 The Container Lifecycle 6 chapters
- 5 Images and Containerfiles
- 6 Building with Buildah
- 7 Distributing Images with Skopeo
- 8 Running Containers
- 9 Storage, Volumes, and Artifacts
- 10 Pods
Part 3 Networking 2 chapters
- 11 Networking with Netavark
- 12 Rootless Networking with pasta
Part 4 Security 2 chapters
- 13 The Podman Security Model
- 14 Supply Chain Security
Part 5 Orchestrating with Podman 6 chapters
- 15 systemd and Quadlet
- 16 Health Checks and Self-Healing
- 17 Compose and the Docker API
- 18 Kubernetes Workflows
- 19 Observability and OpenTelemetry
- 20 A Production Deployment with Quadlet
Part 6 Podman Among the Alternatives 2 chapters
- 21 The Same App Four Ways
- 22 Podman in a Kubernetes World
Part 7 Appendices 3 appendices
- A Docker to Podman Migration
- B Troubleshooting Field Guide
- C Configuration Reference
For engineers who already ship containers.
This is a production field guide, not an introduction to containers. It assumes you know Docker and Linux and picks up where the getting-started guides stop.
- Practicing DevOps, platform, and SRE engineers who already know Docker and Linux.
- Teams moving production workloads from a daemon-based runtime to a daemonless, rootless one.
- Engineers who want systemd, Quadlet, health checks, and OpenTelemetry wired together, not just described.
- You are new to containers and want an introduction to images, registries, and namespaces.
- You want a click-by-click GUI tutorial rather than the command line and unit files.
Get the book.
One DRM-free PDF, yours to keep. The introductory price is $29 (regular price $39) and includes the runnable examples archive and free updates for the whole Podman 6.x line.