I'd still rather use docker. I don't mind that the daemon runs as root because there are some things that you need root for anyways! Like binding to privileged ports or setting up networks (use `internal: true` and the daemon will automatically set up iptables rules that limit traffic).

I deploy docker compose files with ansible so everything comes with built in security defaults like rootless, dropped caps, no new privileges, etc. I wish more containers supported running read only (its usually pretty easy to add, just overlooked) and distroless (common for go apps, less so otherwise).

There was a pretty good comment on reddit a while back with a list of hardenings for compose files [1]

1. https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1pr74r4/comment...

The '--userns=auto' argument is a useful isolation method in both rootless and rootful Podman containers. This allows rootful Podman to orchestrate privileged capabilities while running the container processes in an unprivileged namespace.

See the discussion here:

https://github.com/podman-container-tools/podman/discussions...

Personally I still think this is not enough, and we really need full generalized (not AI-only) microvm support built into docker/podman, like yesterday.

Currently it's difficult to even get a hold of a properly configured minimal kernel (or time-consuming to try to build one) and all the right command-line incantations to even start a one-off microvm using say, qemu, with all the proper storage/networking/etc. bits one needs for production environments. Plus you need to keep that kernel updated very regularly.

I know there's projects like smolvm that try to make this simpler, but I've had some major problems with those solutions as well, and I just feel like the big boys need to step up and support this directly by now.