Podman is a daemonless container engine for running OCI containers and pods on Linux, developed primarily by Red Hat. Unlike Docker, there is no long-running root daemon mediating container operations: the podman CLI forks conmon per container, which then execs crun or runc to launch the workload, and exits when the container exits.
This fork-exec model is what enables Podman’s rootless support: a normal user can create containers in their own user namespace, with UID/GID mappings backed by /etc/subuid and /etc/subgid and networking handled by slirp4netns or pasta instead of privileged bridge setup. Podman natively understands Kubernetes-style pods as a group of containers sharing a network namespace, and podman generate kube produces Kubernetes YAML from a running pod while podman play kube does the reverse, making it useful for local development of workloads destined for a cluster.
The CLI is intentionally a drop-in for Docker — aliasing docker=podman works for most workflows — and on macOS and Windows podman machine provisions a Fedora CoreOS VM to run the Linux engine. Related projects in the same family include Buildah for image builds, Skopeo for image inspection and copy, and CRI-O for the Kubernetes runtime interface, all of which share Podman’s containers/storage and containers/image libraries.