I did say at the very beginning of this section that we were going to be using Docker, simply because resource wise there is so much and the community is very big, but also this was really where the indents to making containers popular came from. I would encourage you to go and watch some of the history around Docker and how it came to be, I found it very useful.
But as I have alluded to there are other alternatives to Docker. If we think about what Docker is and what we have covered. It is a platform for developing, testing, deploying, and managing applications.
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.
I am going to be looking at this from a Windows point of view but know that like Docker there is no requirement for virtualisation there as it will use the underlying OS which is cannot do in the Windows world.
Podman can be run under WSL2 although not as sleek as the experience with Docker Desktop. There is also a Windows remote client where you can connect to a Linux VM where your containers will run.
Run a system update and upgrade with the `sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade` command. Finally, we can install podman using `sudo apt install podman`
We can now use a lot of the same commands we have been using for docker, note that we do not have that nice docker desktop UI. You can see below I used `podman images` and I have nothing after installation then I used `podman pull ubuntu` to pull down the ubuntu container image.
If you are moving from docker to podman it is also common to change your config file to have `alias docker=podman` that way any command you run with docker will use podman.
LXC is a containerisation engine that enables users again to create multiple isolated Linux container environments. Unlike Docker, LXC acts as a hypervisor for creating multiple Linux machines with separate system files, and networking features. Was around before Docker and then made a short comeback due to Docker's shortcomings.
A standalone container runtime. Containerd brings simplicity and robustness as well as of course portability. Containerd was formerly a tool that runs as part of Docker container services until Docker decided to graduate its components into standalone components.
