VSHN.timer #81: Podman vs. Docker; Face-Off!

Welcome to another VSHN.timer! Every Monday, 5 links related to Kubernetes, OpenShift, CI / CD, and DevOps; all stuff coming out of our own chat system, making us think, laugh, or simply work better.

This week we’re going to talk about the latest techniques to build the containers that will host your applications in production.

1. Standard stock pictures of containers and cranes in a harbor are a bit cliché, agreed. But this article provides a short and sweet collection of best practices for writing and optimizing Dockerfiles by Kasun Rajapakse. No matter if you use Podman or Docker, these guidelines will surely help you deploy smaller images, and faster.

https://blog.bitsrc.io/best-practices-for-writing-a-dockerfile-68893706c3

2. The competition with Podman is heating up! Docker has recently released a new component: BuildKit, available since Docker 20.10. It dramatically speeds up image build thanks to parallelism, includes better support for passing secrets, and many more features, although not all are enabled by default. Itamar Turner-Trauring explains how to enable them and how to use all of BuildKit in his blog.

https://pythonspeed.com/articles/docker-buildkit/

3. BuildKit is so cool that we are starting to see integrations with other tools. For example, the BuildKit CLI plugin for kubectl made by VMWare enables a shorter build-deploy-test cycle for your containers into your favorite orchestrator platform. If you want to know more about it, read the blog post from Yong Wei Lun and Vadim Bauer from Container Registry.

https://container-registry.com/posts/productivity-lift-buildkit-cli-for-kubectl/

4. One of the biggest missing features in Podman was, without any doubt, the support for Docker Compose. Well, good news! Podman 3.0 includes support for it. Brent Baude from Red Hat explains it all including the required sample code to help you understand how to use it, and also highlighting some caveats (TL;DR: if you use Docker Swarm, it won’t work.)

https://www.redhat.com/sysadmin/podman-docker-compose

5. Do you live in Switzerland, work with containers, and have 5 minutes? Our friends in Netzwoche have published a poll about the container market in Switzerland (in German only). Please provide your answer, and let’s find out what are the current trends for container technology in our country.

https://www.netzwoche.ch/news/2021-02-09/jetzt-bei-der-umfrage-zu-storage-und-container-mitmachen

Are you still using docker or have you migrated to podman completely? How do you optimize the speed of your container build times? Do you have any Dockerfile tips to share with the community? Get in touch with us and see you next week for another edition of VSHN.timer.

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PS³: check out our previous VSHN.timer editions about Containers: #12, #17, #40, #51, #54, and #71.