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Integrating Podman and systemd

Perfect Harmony

Article from ADMIN 62/2021

By Thorsten Scherf

With the integration of Podman and systemd, you can put any software inside a container under the control of systemd and see almost no difference between running the service directly on the host or inside a container.

Podman is considered the standard when it comes to managing containers and pods. Seamless integration into the systemd world is a big help, especially in environments where Kubernetes is not used and users want to deploy arbitrary software within containers. After the release of Podman version 2.0, the two components now work in even closer collaboration.

Some readers might frown at the thought of linking Podman [1] and systemd [2] more closely, and with good reason. After all, microservices should run primarily within containers, without the need for a service manager like systemd. This idea is correct as far as it goes, and in an ideal world, Kubernetes exclusively manages orchestration for containers with microservices. However, experience shows that this is not always possible and that other architectures must also be taken into account. One reason is certainly that software often still exists in classic form and does not necessarily follow a microservice-based architecture.

Administrators don't want to miss out on the benefits that running software inside a container bring, and there are use cases for running software in containers like regular services on a host. Because Podman is known to be based on a fork/exec model, unlike Docker, it is easy to put containers under the control of systemd to leverage all of the benefits that the system and service manager offers. In this article, I show examples of both use cases.

Inside and Outside Containers

To begin, you will discover how easy it is to put any software inside a container under the control of systemd. Listing 1 shows a container file that you can use to create a new container image. The description file for the new image installs the desired software (just the

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