Red Hat Podman Container Engine Gets a Desktop Interface

Red Hat’s open source Podman container engine now has a full-fledged desktop interface.

With a visual user interface replacing Podman’s command lines, the open source enterprise software company wants to attract developers new to the containerization space, as well as small businesses that wish to test the waters for running their applications on Kubernetes, particularly of the OpenShift variety.

The desktop “simplifies the creation, management, and deployment of containers, while abstracting the underlying configuration, making it a lightweight, efficient alternative for container management, reducing the administrative overhead,” promised Mithun Dhar, Red Hat vice president and general manager for developer tools and programs, in a blog post.

Podman, short for Pod Manager, is a command line tool for managing containers in a Linux environment, executing tasks such as inspecting and running containers, building and pulling images.

👁 Image

In its own Linux distributions, Red Hat offers Podman in lieu of the Docker container engine for running containers. Docker also has a desktop interface for its own container engine, so time will tell how Red Hat’s desktop interface will compare. The Red Hat desktop can work not only with the Podman container engine itself but also with Docker and Lima, a container engine for Mac.

The Podman Desktop 1.0 offers a visual environment for all of these tasks supported by Podman itself. From the comfort of a graphical user interface, devs can build images, pull images from registries, push images to OCI registries, start and stop containers, inspect logs, start terminal sessions from within the containers, and test and deploy their images on Kubernetes. It also offers widgets to monitor the usage of the app itself.

It’s very Kubernetes-friendly. Kind, a tool for running Kubernetes multi-node clusters locally, provides an environment for creating and testing applications. Developers can work directly with Kubernetes Objects through Podman.

The Podman desktop can be installed on Windows, Linux or Mac.

OpenShift Connects

OpenShift is Red Hat’s enterprise Kubernetes platform, and so not surprisingly, Red Hat is using a Podman as a ramp-up point for the OpenShift.

The desktop, Dhar wrote, is integrated with Red Hat OpenShift Local, which provides a way to test applications in a production-equivalent environment.

Podman Desktop is also connected to Developer Sandbox for Red Hat OpenShift, a free cloud-based OpenShift hosting service. This could provide an organization to test its applications in a Kubernetes environment.

Red Hat released the desktop software during its Red Hat Summit, being held this week in Boston.

Other Red Hat news this week from the Summit:

This year’s #RHSummit will be all about dealing with the realities of #AI — Matt Hicks, CEO @RedHat pic.twitter.com/ZAiq0ubGkT

— Joab Jackson (@Joab_Jackson) May 23, 2023

Tom Gilbert, head of cloud for @Barclays, explains the bank’s workload placement, based on a active-active hybrid cloud setup. 70% of the workloads run in the cloud and the company maintains 6K severs for private cloud work… #RHSummit pic.twitter.com/em6JhPhiuh

— Joab Jackson (@Joab_Jackson) May 23, 2023

#RHSummit: @RedHat CTO @kernelcdub intros the Red Hat Developer Hub, based on the open source #Backstage and integrated with OpenShift for easy deployment, and the new Red Hat OpenShift Data Science for managing AI models… #PlatformEngineering pic.twitter.com/6nTtz4WpFT

— Joab Jackson (@Joab_Jackson) May 23, 2023

#RHSummit: @asheshbadani debuts Event Driven Ansible, which can initiate a workflow based on input, such as from an observability tool (Dynatrace etc). Using templates it can kick off automated remediations, like allocating more storage, and document its actions in ServiceNow. pic.twitter.com/vCt2dUfAzu

— Joab Jackson (@Joab_Jackson) May 23, 2023

Red Hat paid for this reporter’s travel and lodging to attend the Red Hat Summit.