Over the last few years Docker has been a staple of our workflow. Without it what could we have accomplished? Lately, it seems like the hit is in on Docker.

First, Kubernetes trumped Docker Swarm as the orchestrator of choice, then Kubernetes dropped support of docker as a container runtime (containerd over dockershim) and now Podman is replacing docker on the desktop (RHEL 8 and Ubuntu 20.10).

My first impression is a sad feeling for Docker Inc. As no other technology that I know of has changed the face of software development and deployment in such a short period of time.

On the other hand, there must be valid reasons for various communities turning their backs on you.

As for me, Podman is a welcome change. I use containers for everything from automating daily tasks, to working a sort of package manager, to daily work in Kubernetes. I've wanted a daemon-less, user-space container runtime for a while.

Just the idea of the "Pod" itself is a huge benefit over Docker. The ability to run multiple containers inside a pod will bring a lot benefits to development teams, allowing them to streamline their tooling, from docker + docker-compose + Kubernetes to just Podman and K8s manifests.

It's kind of scary how quick the container world is moving. It reminds me too much of the front-end web development world over the past 2 decades. At least for now it seems to be in the direction of consolidation, open standards and use-case specific tooling. Hopefully we can keep up!