Podman provides some extra features that help developers and operators in Kubernetes environments. There are extra commands provided by Podman that are not available in Docker.

Podman commands are the same as Docker’s When building Podman, the goal was to make sure that Docker users could easily adapt. So all the commands you are familiar with also exist with Podman. In fact, the claim is made that if you have existing scripts that run Docker you can create a docker alias for podman and all your scripts should work (alias docker=podman). Try it.

Have you ever built an image only to realize that you actually need it on a user account other than root, requiring you to rebuild the image again in rootless mode? Or have you built an image on one machine but run containers on the image using multiple different machines? Now you need to set up an account on a registry, push the image to the registry, Secure Shell (SSH) to each device you want to run the image on, and then pull the image. The podman image scp command solves both of these annoying scenarios as quickly as they occur.

Running containers without Docker is possible with Podman.

daemonless container engine

Hence, Podman allows the creation and execution of Pods from a Kubernetes YAML file (see podman-play-kube). Podman can also generate Kubernetes YAML based on a container or Pod (see podman-generate-kube), which allows for an easy transition from a local development environment to a production Kubernetes cluster.

We believe that Kubernetes is the defacto standard for composing Pods and for orchestrating containers, making Kubernetes YAML a defacto standard file format.

Simply put: alias docker=podman.