I don’t trust anything related to red hat
Genuine question here: why?
Have you seen how they have behaved recentl?
You mean showing a commitment to open-source and keeping all of their software open-source (when most other “open-source” companies in similar situations switched to non-Free licenses, like Elasticsearch for example)?
It’s just morally rough that they basically said they don’t get anything of benefit from contributing to open source despite really owing their start to it
Thanks for the honest answer.
Interesting. But what If I’m not using CoreOS? Also RedHat fucked up by using YAML for configuration.
what if I’m not using CoreOS?
Podman runs on any distro (or more strictly: any distro that uses systemd). It’s essentially a FOSS alternative to Docker.
…except I can run Docker anywhere. It’s not tied to systemd. These quadlets seem like a very systemd-specific thing. Which is great if you’re building everything around systemd but it’s a niche.
systemd [is] a niche
Maybe in the wider world of all the operating systems installed on all the computers, but for Linux-based computing it is, like it or not, near ubiquitous these days. And in particular for server systems (and this is, after all, /m/selfhosted), good luck finding something that isn’t systemd-based unless you’re deliberately choosing a BSD or aiming for a system which has ever-decreasing amounts of support available.
This being selfhosted is exactly the reason I would’ve expected people to be aware there’s more variety out there. systemd is not as ubiquitous as you make it sound.
Secondly, tying your containerization solution into your init system is a spectacularly bad idea. You could already tie containers into systemd units, quadlets just make it easier; but the best practice advice is to not do it at all. You have a restart policy built into docker/podman for a reason. Let the init system deal with podman/docker itself, and let podman/docker manage their containers.
Third, the article title is misleading; if anything it should say quadlets made them give up podman-compose, not docker-compose. There’s no reason to reference docker in this article — unless you’re doing it for the views.
Dependencies within unrelated projects (ie, sharing a single database container for a few unrelated apps) is something that would be pretty handy, and is missing from compose.
Auto-updates are cool - but also dangerous… I think there’s something in running watchtower manually like I have been - when something breaks straight after, I know the cause.
Couldn’t you just create a compose file for a database separately?
I don’t really understand what you’re suggesting. Having a seperate compose file for your database would “work”, but you’d lack any of the dependency handling.
Honestly, this is kinda making me wanna redeploy a couple app stacks I have on a VPS. Hmm.
Oh, well that’s simple…
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I use podman because it’s more secure. I’m willing to put in the extra effort so that all my services aren’t running as root. If it turns out a vulnerability is discovered in lemmy tomorrow that allows people to access my server through my lemmy container, the attacker will only have access to a dummy account that hosts my containers. Yes, they could stop all my containers, but they can’t delete the volumes or any other data on my server.
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Don’t let perfection be the enemy of good. Security is not all or nothing. Reducing the attack surface is still important.
Can you elaborate on running docker daemon as rootless? It’s my understanding that you can add your account to a group to access the docker daemon rootless, but the containers are still running as root, as the daemon itself raises the access to root.
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I never said I was relying on it alone. Not sure why you think that.
That’s a great link. Thank you for sharing. It’s good that docker supports this functionality now.
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I think you’re interpreting too much. Security is about layers and making it harder for attackers, and that’s exactly what using a non-root user does.
In that scenario, the attacker needs to find and exploit another vulnerability to gain root access, which takes time - time which the attacker might not be willing to spend and time which you can use to respond.
but the containers are still running as root, as the daemon itself raises the access to root.
No. The daemon can run without root, as such the containers don’t have root. My docker install doesn’t have root access. None of my stacks / containers need any root access tbh. I don’t have any troubles with deplyong stuff.
In my limited experience, when Podman seems more complicated than Docker, it’s because the Docker daemon runs as root and can by default do stuff Podman can’t without explicitly giving it permission to do so.
99% of the stuff self-hosters run on regular rootful Docker can run with no issues using rootless Podman.
Rootless Docker is an option, but my understanding is most people don’t bother with it. Whereas with Podman it’s the default.
Docker is good, Podman is good. It’s like comparing distros, different tools for roughly the same job.
Pods are a really powerful feature though.
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on surface they may look like they are overlapping solutions to the untrained eye.
You’ll need to elaborate on this, since AFAIK Podman is literally meant as a replacement for Docker. My untrained eye can’t see what your trained eye can see under the surface.
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Perhaps I misunderstand the words “overlapping” and “hot-swappable” in this case, I’m not a native english speaker. To my knowledge they’re not the same thing.
In my opinion wanting to run an extra service as root to be able to e.g. serve a webapp on an unprivileged port is just strange. But I’ve been using Podman for quite some time. Using Docker after Podman is a real pain, I’ll give you that.
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If you make something with Podman yourself it is actually less work most of the time (the OP tutorial is incredibly convoluted for no reason).
But sure, if someone else did all the work for you and you just need to download the docker-compose file and run it, that is of course less work for you. But that is just a result of Docker’s relative popularity compared to Podman.
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Yes, but only 10% or so of the article is about what you actually need to know to use Quadlet and the rest is some convoluted mess that I don’t know why the author bothered with sharing that.
Major typically writes these as much for his own notes / thoughts as anything. Having some insight into how he got where he is in the process can help some others learn. I’ve learned tons from the guy.
I’ve known him over 15 years, and he always has written posts for himself first. This isn’t a bad way, just maybe not the simplest for experienced folks. Laying out your own thoughts along the path can help later when you wonder why you did X instead of Y.
