Production-Grade Container Deployment with Podman Quadlets – Larvitz Blog

Summary

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. Rootless containers: 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. OCI compliance: Full compatibility with Docker images and registries - your existing container images work without modification Pod support: Kubernetes-style pod concepts for grouping containers, making the transition to K8s smoother if needed Fork/exec model: Unlike Docker’s client-server architecture, Podman uses traditional Unix fork/exec, making it more auditable and debuggable with sta...