distribution-spec VS podman

Back in 2013, a little company called Docker made it really easy to start using containers to package up applications. A big key to their success was the OCI (you can learn about that here), an industry wide initiative to have standards around how we package up our applications. Because of OCI standards, we have hundreds (maybe thousands?) of tools that can be combined to manage and deploy applications. So why aren’t we using this for packaging up Notebooks and AI models as well? It would make deploying, sharing, and managing our models easier for everyone involved.

Kubernetes on the backend used to utilize docker for much of its container runtime solutions. One of the modular features of Kubernetes is the ability to utilize a Container Runtime Interface or CRI. The problem was that Docker didn't really meet the spec properly and they had to maintain a shim to translate properly. Instead users could utilize the popular containerd or cri-o runtimes. These follow the Open Container Initiative or OCI's guidelines on container formats.

OCI stands for Open Container Initiative, and its goal as an organization is to define a specification for container formats and runtime.

https://opencontainers.org/

Here is Containerfile from the repo: https://github.com/ublue-os/bazzite/blob/main/Containerfile

apko allows us to build OCI container images from .apk packages.

Flagger's load testing service can be installed via a Kustomization resource based on manifests packaged as an artifact in an Open Container Initiative (OCI) registry

CRI-O is a lightweight container runtime for Kubernetes. It is an implementation of Kubernetes CRI to use Open Container Initiative (OCI) compatible runtimes for running pods. It supports runc and Kata Containers as the container runtimes, but any OCI-compatible runtime can be integrated.

So somebody else created runj (runj is an experimental, proof-of-concept OCI-compatible runtime for FreeBSD jails.) https://github.com/samuelkarp/runj

A lot of well-known Docker alternatives emerged at this point, the most commonly recommended of which must be Podman (along with Podman Desktop). This is what I use on my Windows machines, and this was the first solution that I tried on the Macbook as well.

Example of why: https://github.com/containers/podman/issues/5102#issuecommen...

Podman

Even though we will focus on Docker for this article, I wanted to mention that there are more container creation and management tools such as Podman, Rkt, and so on.

By using containerization, the application will always have the same configuration that is used in the development environment and production environment. There is no more "It works on my machine". Some examples of containerization technologies are Docker and Podman.

Podman Documentation. Podman is a daemonless container engine for developing, managing, and running OCI Containers on your Linux System.

AFAIK podman either already supports pods in quadlet container files, or will in the near future. https://github.com/containers/podman/pull/20762

Podman as a devcontainers engine doesn't currently work if you use devcontainer features [1] or (and this sounds like you're issue) if you use WSL2.

I haven't submitted the WSL2 issue to the Podman team yet. If you get to it before I do, can you like it here?

https://github.com/containers/podman/issues/18691#issuecomme...

You can also use their Oracle Linux Docker images with the database preinstalled using either Podman or Docker. Just make absolutely sure you are downloading something you are licensed to use, because it seems really easy to accidentally infringe copyright via this method.