pack VS podman

I've recently found this quote by Kelsey Hightower:

"I'm convinced the majority of people managing infrastructure just want a PaaS. The only requirement: it has to be built by them."

Source: https://twitter.com/kelseyhightower/status/85193508753294540...

In the last few weeks, I've experimented a bit with Flux (https://fluxcd.io/), Tekton (https://tekton.dev/) and Cloud Native Buildpacks (https://buildpacks.io/) on how to provide K8s powered git push deployments without using a dedicated CI/CD server.

My project is still in early alpha stage and just a proof of concept :-) My vision is to expand it into an Open Source PaaS in the future.

Do you think the above quote is true? What does an open source PaaS need to be like in order to be accepted by software developers?

Some other projects have been discontinued in the past (like Flynn or Deis) or were created before the Kubernetes era.

Is it the right direction to provide a Heroku like solution based on K8s or is it better to provide an Open Source Infrastructure as Code library with building blocks to avoid everything from scratch?

Although Dockerfiles have the benefit of migrating existing workloads to containers without having to update your toolchain, I definitely prefer the container-first workflow. Cloud Native [Buildpacks](https://buildpacks.io/) are a CNCF incubating project but were proven at Heroku. Buildpacks support common languages, but working on a Go project I've also had a great experience with [ko](https://ko.build/). Free yourself from Dockerfile!

Cloud Native Buildpacks

It's big and overwhelming and sometimes scary. But you know what? It's also fun, engaging, and very refreshing. Because I'm a DevRel, I don't have many chances to focus on something particular. Still, I'm having a lot of fun exploring different CMSs (like Statamic, Craft, or Sanity), new approaches (at last, I understood why the headless approach is so important), and diving into tech I never used before (hello Buildpacks).

[5] https://buildpacks.io/

Devbox analyzes your source code and instantly turns it into an OCI-compliant image that can be deployed to any cloud. The image is optimized for speed, size, security and caching ... and without needing to write a Dockerfile. And unlike buildpacks, it does it quickly.

I had a short look into buildpacks.io . So I don't have a firm opinion yet. But as much i understand now, it really builds Container images. Kubero goes a different approach. The buildstep only compiles the project to a mounted volume, which is mounted readonly to the running container. Further more is the detection step unnecessary, since the dev knows what he wants to build and selects the buildimage. How ever, I'm still looking into it, so see if my project can profit from the great work there in any other way.

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.

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.

It's an open source project. https://github.com/containers/podman and https://podman.io - go there, get engaged, see what's going on and most important become part of the community and contribute!

If you are using a rootless container management system, you can set the JEKYLL_ROOTLESS environment variable to any non-zero value. For example, you can use the following to initialize a new jekyll project in the current directory using podman.

Podman 4.7.2: Podman 4.7.2 is now included in Windows and Mac installers