I must say that I am quite jealous of Podman. While I had to stay at home for most of 2020, Podman went on a world tour at a velocity we could only dream of. At the time of writing, 139 authors from all over the world contributed over 2000 pull requests, and we closed over 1400 issues. And I am only counting the Podman repository—my team and community members also contribute to and maintain Buildah, Skopeo, and the containers/image and containers/storage libraries.
Without a doubt, the biggest Podman highlight of 2020 was the release of Podman 2.0, which ships with a brand new REST API. This new API is compatible with Docker, enabling a smooth user experience when switching to Podman while also serving the more advanced features of Podman. It also allowed us to improve the macOS and Windows clients, reaching even more users on these platforms.
But containers really are a Linux concept, and we did not lose focus on Linux systems. Lot’s of work went into improving the rootless experience—running Podman without root privileges as an ordinary user—such as rootless networking. We further enhanced Podman and the underlying libraries to run even in the most restricted environments, such as high-performance clusters, where the crun container runtime plays a central role.
I could go on for hours about all the great work the community has done in 2020 and why I think Podman is such a great tool for developers and sysadmins alike. But instead, I suggest looking at the top 12 Podman posts on Enable Sysadmin below. Stay safe, take care, and see you all in 2021!
