The Red Hat development team behind the Podman container engine has announced the completion of Podman Desktop 1.0. As an alternative to the widely used Docker Desktop, Podman Desktop is also designed to simplify containerized software development on local computers to ensure smooth and efficient processes for developers.
In addition to connecting to Kubernetes and the Red Hat OpenShift container platform based on it, Podman Desktop also allows developers to work with more complex cluster environments locally, as are typical for the productive operation of business applications. Podman differs from Docker Desktop in that the software is completely open source (under the Apache 2.0 license) and by default it expects containers to work without root rights (rootless containers).
Local development environment with multi-node Kubernetes clusters
Podman Desktop 1.0 follows Red Hat’s pre-release versions 0.14 and 0.15, released at KubeCon+CloudNativeCon Europe 2023, which introduced options for managing child clusters, among other things. As a container orchestration tool, Kind allows developers to adapt their local environment for application development to the later target environment for productive use of the software.
Unlike Docker Compose, which is only designed for single-node environments, Kind can also be used to set up multi-node Kubernetes clusters. In this way, even more complex development and test environments can be created with Podman Desktop without the developer having to deal with the complexity of the infrastructure configuration in detail.
If OpenShift is the target platform for the new application, with Red Hat OpenShift Local integration, Podman Desktop offers a relatively simple option to simulate the future production environment early in the application development and test phase. OpenShift Local also runs locally on the development machine, but is limited to single-node OpenShift clusters.
Other innovations in Podman Desktop that are intended to contribute to a better developer experience include a number of bug fixes and user interface improvements, such as the ability to load extensions without a container engine having to run locally. When creating new Podman machines, developers can choose whether they should run as root, as required, for example, when running a child on Windows.
For a complete overview of Podman Desktop 1.0, see Announced on the Red Hat Developer Blog. Different versions are available for Linux, macOS and Windows available for download from Podman’s desktop website.
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