Podman in Production: The Book, and the Pipeline Behind It

My first encounter with Podman back in 2020 was involuntary. A customer with

air-gapped RHEL 7 machines that we needed to deploy a containerized

microservices stack on. Installing third-party software like Docker on them

would have been a major bureaucratic hurdle, so I looked at what we could use

that came built in.

The tooling had its quirks — at least the way we were using it — but the

general daemonless architecture of the Podman ecosystem just felt right from

the beginning. And needless to say, the current version of said customer

project is still running on Podman today. Not only that, but many more

instances followed.

Being a big fan of good technical books, my first thought was: someone should

write a book about this fine piece of technology. So I started with outlines,

wrote the first chapters, bought a domain, started over again, life (and work)

got in the way, and so on. Of course in the meantime quite a few Podman books

were released, and I think I've bought most of them.

Two things gave my book project enough momentum to finally reach a release

version now: my personal interest in the upcoming (now already released)

version 6 of Podman, and the advances in frontier LLMs.

AI was part of every step of the publishing process. The diagram below shows

the whole toolchain: Markdown sources and runnable examples pass a source gate

(just check), the build produces a provenance-stamped PDF/EPUB, an artifact

gate (just check-artifacts) checks the result, and just release ships

everything to Polar; just verify-polar checks what Polar actually serves,

down to a real buyer checkout with --buyer-path.

For the build pipeline, md2pdf (a CLI Markdown-to-PDF converter that "I" wrote

independently of the book) discovers chapters, merges metadata, pre-renders

diagram fences, then runs pandoc once: LuaLaTeX with a KOMA book template for

print (cover included in the same run so metadata and outline survive), epub3

for the reflowable edition.

And yes, it feels like cheating. But creating the publishing pipeline and

tweaking the typography alone would have cost me weeks instead of days.

If you are interested in publishing high-quality technical writing (let's

postpone the discussion of whether anyone still needs that in an AI age),

feel free to ping me.

And of course, if you want to take a look at sample chapters of the book, you

can find them on the book's landing page:

.