🔗 Switching from Docker to Podman

I'm old enough to remember when Vagrant looked like a promised land where every development environment would look the same. Differences between language versions, as well as some unusual OS version differences, resulted in a few days of unproductive debugging of your development environment. I've had similar excitement when I started my first Docker Swarm (who uses that these days?!) - it felt revolutionary. Docker wasn't just a tool - it fundamentally changed how we thought about application development and deployment. Having a repeatable, separated environment from your local system was refreshing and looked like a superpower. It has become a must-have tool for every engineer. "Just Dockerize it" became my go-to solution for pretty much everything. Sure, architecture or defining a new Docker image could be a bit finicky at times, but hey, that's just how things worked. Is the persistent dockerd daemon eating upresources in the background with root privileges, just the price of doing business? I thought so.

If you are in this industry long enough, there is one pattern that emerges every day. Everybody begins questioning the "that's just how it's done" mentality. Along the way, the quiet Docker daemon running in the background felt less like a comfortable constant and more like a ticking bomb. More and more ways to explore this vulnerability emerged:

2019-02-11 - CVE-2019-5736 (runC container escape): lets a process in a container overwrite the host’s runc binary → full host compromise if exploited.

2022-03-07 - CVE-2022-0847 “Dirty Pipe” (Linux kernel): read-only file overwrite in kernel; practical container-to-host abuse scenarios documented by Docker/Sysdig.

2022-03-07 - CVE-2022-0492 (cgroups v1 release_agent): privilege escalation / container escape via cgroups v1; mitigations via seccomp/AppArmor/SELinux.

2024-01-31 - CVE-2024-21626 (runC “Leaky Vessels”): fd leak + process.cwd issues enabling host FS access and potential escape; fixed in runC 1.1.12 (Docker Engine ≥ 25.0.2).

2024-02-01 - CVE-2024-23651/23652/23653 (BuildKit, “Leaky Vessels”): build-time issues that can affect host files; fixed in BuildKit 0.12.5.

2024-09-23 - In-the-wild cryptojacking campaign: attackers targeted exposed Docker APIs and microservices.

2024-10-01 - Docker API swarm botnet campaign: cryptojacking via exposed Docker Engine API (details).

I had been seeking an alternative (I assumed that someone had already questioned the status quo), and that's how I stumbled into Podman territory. It began as casual curiosity - "Hey, let me check out this thing" - turned into a complete overhaul of my container workflows and pulled me into using Fedora in my home lab. And honestly? I wish I'd made the switch sooner.