Podman

Podman is a container engine developed primarily by Red Hat that runs, builds, and manages OCI-compliant containers without relying on a persistently running background daemon, in contrast to Docker's client-server architecture. Its defining feature is rootless operation: containers run under the invoking user's own permissions rather than requiring root access, which shrinks the attack surface significantly and makes Podman attractive for CI/CD pipelines and security-hardened production environments. Podman's CLI is intentionally near-identical to Docker's, letting teams alias the docker command to podman and reuse existing Dockerfiles and images with minimal friction, while native support for pods (groups of containers sharing resources, mirroring Kubernetes pod semantics) and tight systemd integration via Quadlet extend its usefulness well beyond simple container drop-in replacement.