Working with Pods

Learn how to use Podman’s built-in support for pods to group and manage multiple containers with shared networking — just like Kubernetes.

One of Podman’s standout features is its native support for pods — a concept borrowed directly from Kubernetes.

Pods allow you to group containers so they share the same network namespace, making it easy to colocate services like a web server and a database.

🧠 What Is a Pod?

A pod is a group of one or more containers that:

• Share the same IP address and port space
• Communicate over localhost
• Can be managed together

📦 This is useful when building applications with tightly coupled components that need to run together — and it mirrors how Kubernetes deploys workloads.

➕ Creating a Pod

Create a new pod:

podman pod create --name webstack

List all pods:

podman pod ps

Inspect a pod:

podman pod inspect webstack

🧱 Adding Containers to a Pod

Add a container to your pod:

podman run -dt --pod webstack nginx

Then add another:

podman run -dt --pod webstack redis

Podman run flags

The podman run command uses several flags:

• -d runs the container in detached mode
• -t allocates a pseudo-TTY
• --pod webstack specifies the pod to join

Both containers now share:

• The same IP
• Same ports
• localhost connectivity

🔧 This is very similar to running containers in a docker-compose network, but native to the Podman CLI.

🔍 Viewing Pod Details

See what’s inside the pod:

podman pod inspect webstack

List all containers in a pod:

podman ps --pod

Stop and remove the pod (and its containers):

podman pod stop webstack
podman pod rm webstack

🧪 Example: Web App + Database Pod

podman pod create --name blogpod -p 8080:80

podman run -dt --pod blogpod --name blogdb \
  -e POSTGRES_PASSWORD=secret postgres

podman run -dt --pod blogpod --name blogweb \
  -e DATABASE_URL=postgres://postgres:secret@localhost/postgres \
  myblog:latest

Your blogweb container can now talk to blogdb over localhost:5432.

⚠️ Notes and Limitations

• Containers in a pod share network, but not filesystem by default
• Each container still needs its own volume or mount
• Some tooling may not fully support pods (e.g., podman-compose)

🧩 Pods and Kubernetes

Podman’s pod feature is a stepping stone to full Kubernetes deployment. You can even export pods as Kubernetes YAML:

podman generate kube blogpod > blogpod.yaml

Then replay it later with:

podman play kube blogpod.yaml

🔄 This makes Podman a great tool for local development of Kubernetes apps.

Next up: Docker Compose vs Podman Compose

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