Introduction
Containers have become the de facto standard for application deployment, but the conversation often jumps straight to Kubernetes when discussing production workloads. While K8s excels at large-scale orchestration, many production services don’t require that level of complexity. For single-host or small-scale deployments, a well-architected Podman setup with systemd integration can provide robust, secure, and maintainable infrastructure.
This article demonstrates a production-grade container deployment using Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10, Podman Quadlets, and Traefik as a reverse proxy. We’ll walk through deploying Forgejo (a self-hosted Git service) as a practical example, covering the technical implementation and the architectural decisions behind it.
Why This Approach?
Before diving into the implementation, let’s address the fundamental design decisions:
Podman over Docker
Red Hat has made Podman the standard container runtime in RHEL for compelling technical and security reasons. This isn’t just vendor preference - it represents fundamental architectural improvements:
Daemonless architecture : No privileged daemon running as root, reducing the attack surface significantly. Each container runs as a direct child of systemd or the user session.
: No privileged daemon running as root, reducing the attack surface significantly. Each container runs as a direct child of systemd or the user session. Rootless containers : Native support for running containers as unprivileged users - a first-class feature, not a bolt-on
: Native support for running containers as unprivileged users - a first-class feature, not a bolt-on systemd integration : First-class integration with the init system that already manages your services. This is particularly powerful in RHEL environments where systemd’s maturity and tooling are well-established.
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