Vector: Add support for podman as an alternative to docker

[bruceg]

"Podman is a daemonless container engine for developing, managing, and running OCI Containers on your Linux System. Containers can either be run as root or in rootless mode. Simply put: alias docker=podman"

See also Podman: A more secure way to run containers

Adding support for podman to build and test our containers would be a useful addition for those who don't want to give access to the docker daemon to random users. For most cases, this is a matter of trivially substituting podman for docker in scripts and testing.

Podman also includes "pod" management functionality, similar to Docker Compose or Kubernetes. This would the bigger part of the work, since it's not a straight conversion.

[jdoss]

Podman 2.x now has an API that can be used like Docker.

https://docs.podman.io/en/latest/_static/api.html

This most likely could be used to add in Podman support without having to reinvent too many wheels in Vector.

[jamtur01]

Chatting with @Hoverbear about this and wanted to add a thought. Firstly, podman is probably a better choice than docker/docker-compose from a security/operational perspective. However, as podman is fairly immature on OSX, certainly lacking the Docker Desktop-style ease of use, then I think it'll be hard for folks developing on OSX to adopt podman without some fiddling. I'd suggest we park this for now until podman is easier to use on all the platforms we expect folks to be developing on.

[jdoss]

If you folks are waiting for Podman to have native OS X support we're going to be waiting a long time. Could I help by shoving podman in a Linux VM to aid in in development?

[jamtur01]

Not looking for native OSX support more specifically Docker Desktop-like ease-of-use.

[jdoss]

I don't think you will see that level of ease-of-use since Podman is a Linux only container engine and I don't think the Podman team has any plans to get it running in a Docker Desktop setup. You could use https://github.com/boot2podman/boot2podman to get a instance of Podman running on your laptop pretty easily however. It just got deprecated 7 days ago and I am not sure of the exact Podman version. We'd need Podman 2.0.x or greater.

If I assume correctly, what you folks are looking for would be easy access to the new Podman API on your mac? That should be pretty easy to replicate with a Vagrant VM if you are open to that. I am more than willing to help set that up so it is easy for you folks to use as target practice against in development.

[binarylogic]

This was closed with #3622