My favourite app I use to create and manage containers is Podman Desktop, an open source utility originally built by Red Hat engineers and contributed to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) in 2025.
I recently blogged about native containers on the Apple platform, and its been great to see that the Podman team have an extension that enables the use of Apple Containers with Podman Desktop.
The extension is written in Swift and leverages the socktainer project and the Vapor framework. It provides a Docker compatible API to connect to the Apple containers, and can be installed via the Extensions -> Catalog option in Podman Desktop.
What I love about this, is the simplicity with which native Apple Containers can be created and managed via the Podman Desktop UI, we do not (yet) have “Apple Kubernetes”, using Podman Desktop enables me to use minikube or even OpenShift local to stand up a kubernetes based solution, with apple containers – combining this with Vapor based apps I’m building is allowing me to test what the app’s performance and scalability will look like, all from my MacBook Pro 😃
If you’re starting to look at using Apple Containers, I strongly recommend also looking at Podman Desktop, enjoy 👍
