What is Podman? Podman is a daemon less container engine for developing, managing, and running OCI Containers on your Linux System. Containers can either be run as root or in rootless mode.
Simply put: alias docker=podman.
A pod is the smallest deployable computing unit that can be handled by Kubernetes; it can be made of one or more containers. In the case of multiple containers in the same pod, they are scheduled and run side by side in a shared context.
Podman manages containers and containers’ images, their storage volumes, and pods made of one or multiple containers, and it was built from scratch to adhere to the OCI standards.
Podman, like its predecessor, rkt, has no central daemon managing the containers but starts them as standard system processes. It also defines a Docker-compatible CLI interface to ease the transition from Docker.
One of the great features introduced by Podman is rootless containers. Usually, when we think about Linux containers, we immediately think about a system administrator that should set up some prerequisites at the OS level to prepare the environment that lets our container get up and running.
Rootless containers can easily run as a normal user, without requiring root. Using Podman with a non-privileged user will start restricted containers without any privileges, such as the user running it.