Building containerized applications

Learn how containers and Kubernetes have changed development process and development tools.

Develop for containers with Podman

Red Hat’s lightweight, open standards-based container toolkit is now fully supported and included with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8. Built with enterprise IT security needs in mind, Buildah (container building), Podman (running containers), and Skopeo (sharing/finding containers) help developers find, run, build, and share containerized applications more quickly and efficiently, thanks to the distributed and daemonless nature of the tools.

What are Red Hat's tools for containers?

Linux containers are ideal for deploying microservices-based, cloud-native applications. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 contains and fully supports Red Hat’s lightweight, open standards-based container toolkit. It also provides several new features to simplify and improve container development, management, and security.

Podman logo

Podman

Podman is a complete, daemonless container engine for running, managing, and debugging OCl-compliant containers and pods. It is compatible with the Docker command-line interface (CLI) and enables seamless integration with systemd. Switching from Docker to Podman is easy and intuitive—two commands are all you need.

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Buildah

Buildah allows you to build and modify containers without any daemon or docker. It preserves your existing dockerfile workflow while allowing detailed control over image layers, content, and commits. Buildah also minimizes container image size by using tools from the container host rather than adding them to the container image.

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Skopeo

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 also includes Skopeo, a new, comprehensive tool and library for inspecting, signing, and transferring container images. This advanced container sharing allows you to inspect, verify, and sign image manifests. Move container images between registries. Skopeo uses the same code-base library used by Buildah, Podman, and CRI-O, a lightweight container engine for Kubernetes.

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Podman Desktop

Podman Desktop enables you to easily work with containers from your local environment. Podman Desktop leverages Podman Engine to provide a lightweight and daemon-less container tool.

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crun

crun

crun is a fully-featured OCI runtime and library for running containers written entirely in C. crun is a fast and lightweight command-line program that doesn’t require an external process for managing OCI containers.

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Podman guide for containers

Podman is one of the next-generation container tools (along with Buildah and Skopeo) included in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.6 and later. This cheat sheet covers all of the commands that focus on images, containers, and container resources.

This cheat sheet explains how to:

  • Find, build, and remove images.
  • Run containers on images.
  • Manage container processes and resources.
  • Work with a container's filesystem.

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Podman basics cheat sheet

Container tutorials

Interactive Tutorial

In this lab, you will learn how to craft applications on the top of Universal...

Interactive Tutorial

Learn how container images are built, tagged, organized and leveraged to...

Interactive Tutorial

Learn how a particular host actually runs the container images.

Use enterprise-grade containers to develop in a hybrid world

Part of the beauty of Linux containers is that they are hybrid by design. That means you can code locally, test in the cloud, and deploy anywhere that Linux containers will run. Most Red Hat developer components are available with dockerfiles, or distributed as Linux container images on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (for local dev) and Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform (local, on-line, or public cloud dev). This means that wherever you develop, test, and deploy, you’re using the same development stacks, on-premise to virtual to cloud. To help you get where you’re going faster, the Red Hat container catalog gives you access to certified, trusted and secure application containers.

Try a container

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Red Hat named a Leader in 2024 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Container Management

Recognized for completeness of vision and ability to execute.

Quadrant for Container Management. Gartner Magic Quadrant research methodology provides a graphical competitive positioning of four types of technology providers in fast-growing markets:

Red Hat named a Leader in 2024 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Cloud Application Platforms

Recognized for completeness of vision and ability to execute.

Red Hat has been recognized by Gartner as a Leader in the first-ever 2024 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Application Platforms.