Does Podman have a swarm counterpart, or does running services still effectively require configuring systemd and then switching to kubernetes for multi-machine?
Last I checked there's no native swarm equivalent in podman. Your best bet is nomad (much simpler than k8s if you want to spin some local setups) or kubernetes.
Podman can work with local pods, using the same yaml as for K8s. Not quite docker swarm, but useful for local testing IME when k8s is the eventual target.
Eh, starting with k8s just because I might want kubernetes in five years is a hard sell, given how easy swarm is to setup. devops that does not fulfill an immediate business need should be delayed because that labor is hella expensive.
Docker Compose is really great for multi-container deployments on a single machine. And Docker Swarm takes that same Compose specification (although there were historical differences) and brings it over to clusters, all while remaining similarly simple. I'm surprised that ourside of Docker Swarm, Nomad or lightweight Kubernetes distros like K3s there haven't been that many attempts at simple clustering solutions. Even then, Kubernetes (which Podman supports) ends up being more complex.
They're probably referring to the podman.socket, which isn't quite like a daemon-mode but means it can emulate it pretty well. Unless there is some daemon mode I missed that got added, but I'd be rather surprised at that.
In places where you're doing a `dnf install podman` all you typically need to do is start the service and then point either the podman cli or docker cli directly at it. In Fedora for example it's podman.service.
I honestly prefer using the official docker cli when talking to podman.
