The main differences between Docker and Podman

In the previous sections, we went through the key features of Docker and Podman, looking into the underlying layer, discovering the companion open source projects that made these two tools unique in their container engine role, but now it’s time to compare them.

As we saw earlier, the significant difference between the two is that Docker has a daemon-centric approach while Podman instead has a daemonless architecture. The Podman binary acts as CLI as well as a container engine and uses Conmon to orchestrate and monitor the container runtime.

Looking under the hood into the internals of both projects, we will also find many other differences but, in the end, once the container has started, they both leverage OCI standard container runtimes but with some differences: Docker uses runc while Podman uses crun in most distributions, with some exceptions; for example, it still uses runc in the most conservative Red Hat Enterprise...