I'm currently looking for advice on using Podman to implement what I think is a fairly common application scheme, deploying a WordPress instance with a MariaDB backend and Nginx as a reverse-proxy. 

Ideally I'd like to recreate a DMZ approach where the reverse proxy doesn't have access to the database or any other containers on the host.  I have almost accomplished this with Docker Compose by attaching a frontend network to the reverse proxy and the application containers and a backend network to the application and database containers.  This is a complicated approach and doesn't solve the issue of all application containers being accessible from the reverse proxy container.

I have tried two different approaches to accomplish something similar with Podman, but they both ended with essentially the same result. 

Method one: Enclose all three containers in a single pod.  These pods can access each other via localhost:port.  This approach is not ideal because the reverse proxy container has access to both the application and database containers.

Method two: Create a new network, cni-podman0, with the dnsname CNI plugin and each container is created in its own pod.  This approach is also not ideal because any container on the cni-podman0 network can access any other container on the same network using the pod's name (even if containers and pods do not have published ports).

Any suggestions on where to go from here?  Could SELinux or BPF be possible solutions or am I missing an easier solution?  I also thought about assigning IP addresses to each pod and using the firewall CNI plugin to lock down access by IP and port, but limited documentation on integrating Firewalld and Podman has limited me from experimenting further.

I realize Kubernete's service and network policy features essentially solves this problem, but I am looking for a simplified single host approach here. 

Thanks,

Peter