Dethroning Docker — The New Stack (podman, buildah, skopeo)

Bruno Teixeira
7 min readApr 14, 2022

Introduction

Docker was a game changer in the way we built, delivered and managed applications. And for the last few years Docker has been king of the hill. Is that about to change?

Last week I was browsing through some tech blogs, as one does, when I found myself looking at an article posted on the 5th of April (05/04/2022) and it read

Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Beta is available for testing as of March 31st. This is the first LTS release with Podman, Buildah and Skopeo in the default repos, thanks to the amazing work of Reinhard Tartler and team. Full article.

While I commonly use Podman in some of my projects, I was pleasantly surprised to see this level of adoption and maturity already.

I immediately spun up a Ubuntu container (using the 22.04tag)

podman run --rm -it ubuntu:22.04

Ran the traditional apt updatefollowed by theapt install podman buildah skopeo and I was greeted with the install prompt. I’ll be damned!

Having these tools available in the default repos is a game changer for adoption.

Disclaimer: I only daily drive Podman, I have yet to truly deep dive into Buildah and Skopeo.

Docker Who?

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Bruno Teixeira

Principal Cloud Engineer with a distributed system’s background, a passion for working with the bleeding edge and an unhealthy obsession for automation.