第 1 章 Introduction to containers


Linux containers have emerged as a key open source application packaging and delivery technology, combining lightweight application isolation with the flexibility of image-based deployment methods. Red Hat Enterprise Linux implements Linux containers using core technologies such as:

  • Control groups (cgroups) for resource management
  • Namespaces for process isolation
  • SELinux for security
  • Secure multi-tenancy

These technologies reduce the potential for security exploits and provide you with an environment for producing and running enterprise-quality containers.

Red Hat OpenShift provides powerful command-line and Web UI tools for building, managing, and running containers in units referred to as pods. Red Hat allows you to build and manage individual containers and container images outside of OpenShift. This guide describes the tools provided to perform those tasks that run directly on Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems.

Unlike other container tools implementations, the tools described here do not center around the monolithic Docker container engine and docker command. Instead, Red Hat provides a set of command-line tools that can operate without a container engine. These include:

  • podman - for directly managing pods and container images (run, stop, start, ps, attach, exec, and so on)
  • buildah - for building, pushing, and signing container images
  • skopeo - for copying, inspecting, deleting, and signing images
  • runc - for providing container run and build features to podman and buildah
  • crun - an optional runtime that can be configured and gives greater flexibility, control, and security for rootless containers

Besides these tools, you can also use Podman Desktop, that is, a GUI-based application for container management. Podman Desktop is built on top of Podman, making it easy to create, manage, and run containerized applications visually.

Because these tools are compatible with the Open Container Initiative (OCI), they can be used to manage the same Linux containers that are produced and managed by Docker and other OCI-compatible container engines. However, they are especially suited to run directly on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, in single-node use cases.

For a multi-node container platform, see OpenShift and Using the CRI-O Container Engine for details.

The Podman, Podman Desktop, Skopeo, and Buildah tools were developed to replace Docker command features. Each tool in this scenario is more lightweight and focused on a subset of features.

The main advantages of Podman, Podman Desktop, Skopeo and Buildah tools include:

  • Running in rootless mode - rootless containers are much more secure, as they run without any added privileges
  • No daemon required - these tools have much lower resource requirements at idle, because if you are not running containers, Podman is not running. Docker, conversely, have a daemon always running
  • Native systemd integration - Podman allows you to create systemd unit files and run containers as system services

The characteristics of Podman, Podman Desktop, Skopeo, and Buildah include:

  • Podman, Buildah, and the CRI-O container engine all use the same back-end store directory, /var/lib/containers, instead of using the Docker storage location /var/lib/docker, by default.
  • Although Podman, Buildah, and CRI-O share the same storage directory, they cannot interact with each other’s containers. Those tools can share images.
  • To interact programmatically with Podman, you can use the Podman v2.0 RESTful API, it works in both a rootful and a rootless environment. For more information, see Using the container-tools API chapter.
  • Podman Desktop provides a simple and intuitive interface to run your application workload on a Podman engine.
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