Compatibility Issues Between Docker and Podman, and the Role of OCI: A multivocal literature review
Nyrhinen, Malla (2025)
2025
Tietotekniikan DI-ohjelma - Master's Programme in Information Technology
Informaatioteknologian ja viestinnän tiedekunta - Faculty of Information Technology and Communication Sciences
This publication is copyrighted. You may download, display and print it for Your own personal use. Commercial use is prohibited.
Hyväksymispäivämäärä
2025-05-23
Julkaisun pysyvä osoite on
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:tuni-202505236062
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:tuni-202505236062
Tiivistelmä
Container are used worldwide by companies with a seemingly continuous increase in popularity. Docker is a currently a clear market leader but due to starting to require a subscription from enterprise clients without providing any extra features for the money, or users being unhappy with certain areas in Docker, like security. Podman is marketed as a Docker compatible solution and a rising alternative container technology. Both of these technologies are Open Container Initiative compatible. Open Container Initiative or OCI, creates and maintains standards for containers.
The goal of this master’s thesis is to find out if there are compatibility issue areas between Docker and Podman and what is the role of OCI in those possible compatibility issues. Three research questions were selected for this thesis: Does Docker and Podman have compatibility issues, what are the common compatibility issues between Docker and Podman, and How does OCI help in mitigating these issues. The scope of the areas where compatibility issues were searched for was limited to daemon vs daemonless, compose, networking, rootless vs rootful, volumes, logging and monitoring, integration, and swarm and cluster mode.
The research method selected for this thesis is multivocal literature review, MLR. MLR uses on top of academic papers also grey literature. Grey literature is non-academic sources. The selected research methos is a good choice as there isn’t really published research but data from users is available. All the selected sources do fall into the grey literature scope.
Between Docker and Podman there are compatibility issues in multiple areas. Users have experienced issues in every research are except logging and monitoring, but even that was found out to be a possible compatibility issue. An important discovery is that the issues could be divided into having installations for both Docker and Podman or switching to use Podman from Docker. Most of the issues were if users had installations for both.
OCI has three specifications, runtime, image, and distribution. Compatibility issues found in the research didn’t fall into any of those three areas. As all were outside of OCIs scope, so it was conducted that OCI mitigates issues in the areas it covers.
The goal of this master’s thesis is to find out if there are compatibility issue areas between Docker and Podman and what is the role of OCI in those possible compatibility issues. Three research questions were selected for this thesis: Does Docker and Podman have compatibility issues, what are the common compatibility issues between Docker and Podman, and How does OCI help in mitigating these issues. The scope of the areas where compatibility issues were searched for was limited to daemon vs daemonless, compose, networking, rootless vs rootful, volumes, logging and monitoring, integration, and swarm and cluster mode.
The research method selected for this thesis is multivocal literature review, MLR. MLR uses on top of academic papers also grey literature. Grey literature is non-academic sources. The selected research methos is a good choice as there isn’t really published research but data from users is available. All the selected sources do fall into the grey literature scope.
Between Docker and Podman there are compatibility issues in multiple areas. Users have experienced issues in every research are except logging and monitoring, but even that was found out to be a possible compatibility issue. An important discovery is that the issues could be divided into having installations for both Docker and Podman or switching to use Podman from Docker. Most of the issues were if users had installations for both.
OCI has three specifications, runtime, image, and distribution. Compatibility issues found in the research didn’t fall into any of those three areas. As all were outside of OCIs scope, so it was conducted that OCI mitigates issues in the areas it covers.