10:48 a.m.
Hello Everyone,
I am fairly new the Podman community. My name is Aric Renzo and I am a
DevOps engineer based on Charlotte NC. I have a passion for container
technology and even wrote a book on the now semi-defunct Ansible Container
project. I've been watching Podman, CRI-O, and Open Container Initiative
projects for quite some time and I am quite impressed with Podman and
Buildah providing a fantastic interface for launching Kubernetes style pods
and managing them almost exactly like traditional Docker. The community
has done an absolutely wonderful job in shifting the mindsets of developers
and engineers away from "Docker containers" and "Docker images"
towards a
more general, platform agnostic, "containers" and "container images".
Especially since Docker simply builds and runs OCI container images.
I am writing this email in regards to an issue I opened up on the Buildah
repo yesterday: https://github.com/containers/buildah/issues/1853 .
Essentially, my idea is that if we keep using "Dockerfiles" and
"docker-compose.yml" files to build and test images, it will continue to be
an uphill battle to shift perception away from Docker being the
be-all-end-all of containers. After all, why would someone want to use
Podman to build their Dockerfiles, or CRI-O to run them when they can just
keep using Docker instead? This is why I would suggest using a more vendor
neutral, "Containerfile" and "container-compose.yml" vernacular
instead.
After all, Podman and even Docker do not build "Docker images". They build
OCI container images. Hence, it does not make much sense to keep using
"Dockerfile" or "docker-compose.yml" files.
However, since I opened this issue, I have been thinking that while this
would be a relatively easy code change to get Podman/Buildah to recognize
the presence of "Containerfile" inside a repo and build it, this is far
more of a cultural shift more than anything else. I think that if the
community decides to go this direction, it would be helpful for Podman and
other OCI projects to evangelize and promote a new standard for setting up
the general instruction file to build and ship open container images.
I am open to thoughts and feedback regarding this. I'm wondering if using
a standard like this while great for Podman/Buildah to adopt is more of an
open container initiative community discussion as well? I'm curious about
what the Podman community thinks?
Thank you for your time. I'm excited to meet and interact with everyone
in the community.
Thanks,
--
*Aric A. Renzo*