Red Hat to Donate Podman Along With Other Container Tools to CNCF
Red Hat at the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2024 conference announced its intent to donate multiple tools for creating and managing containers, including Podman, to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).
The portfolio of tools to be donated also includes bootc, a tool for updating operating systems; Buildah, a daemonless tool for building Open Container Initiative (OCI) images; Composefs, an overlay file system; and Skopeo, a command line tool for copying images.
Podman and PodMan Desktop, meanwhile, are a widely used set of container management tools that make it simpler to organize the containers an application developer would use to build an application. As a daemonless alternative to Docker Desktop, Red Hat has been making a case for a Podman tool based on a microservices architecture that it claims provides a more secure method for building cloud-native applications. That approach results in a lighter-weight tool that can be extended more easily.
Red Hat originally developed Podman to help address a container skills shortage. There are simply not enough DevOps engineers available to programmatically configure every container environment, so Red Hat launched an effort to provide a set of tools that can be just as easily used by an inexperienced developer or IT administrator. Creating pods, for example, is a Podman feature that allows developers to easily combine running containers to create customizable pods. The overall goal is to increase the productivity of application developers no matter what their skill level is.
Red Hat reports Podman Desktop has been downloaded more than 1.5 million times and like other Red Hat tools is currently optimized to be used in conjunction with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). The tools will now be further advanced initially as sandbox-level projects under the auspices of the CNCF.
Mitch Ashley, vice president and practice lead for DevOps and application development at The Futurum Group, said Podman makes managing containers, pods, and images more accessible to a wider range of application developers. That’s a critical capability as the number of application development projects involving containers continues to expand. A Techstrong Research survey finds roughly 60% work for organizations making significant investments in container and orchestration technologies over the next two years. Well over half of respondents work for organizations that have already deployed cloud-native applications in a production environment, with another 22% now evaluating whether to follow suit, the survey finds.
There are, of course, potentially millions of developers capable of building these applications. However, because of the complexity of building cloud-native applications the bulk of the application development community has yet to fully embrace microservices as methodology for building software.
Hopefully, there will come a day when advances in artificial intelligence (AI) will make it simpler to build these applications. In the meantime, increasing the productivity of developers of cloud-native applications is critical. There is only so much application development expertise available. If application developers are spending a lot of time not only building microservices but also updating and managing them, there are only so many of them they can build and maintain. The challenge, as always, is making it as simple as possible to build and deploy cloud-native applications at scale.
