Thanks, the bootstrapping idea was not mentioned in the comments, yet. And your blog looks promising, will have a more through look soon.

Nice, thanks, again! I overlooked the dependency instructions in the container service file, which is why I wondered how the heck podman figures out the dependencies. It makes a lot of sense to do it like this, now that I think of it.

Awesome, so, essentially, you create a name.pod file like so:

[Unit]
Description=Pod Description

[Pod]
# stuff like PublishPort or networking

and join every container into the pod through the following line in the .container files: Pod=name.pod

and I presume this all gets started via systemctl --user start name.service and systemd/podman figures out somehow which containers will have to be created and joined into the pod, or do they all have to be started individually?

(Either way, I find the documentation of this feature lacking. When I tested this stuff myself, I’ll look into improving it.)

Understood, thanks, but if I may ask, just to be sure: It seems to me that without interacting with the kubernetes layer, I’m not getting pods, only standalone containers, correct? (Not that I’m afraid of writing kube configuration, as others have inferred incorrectly. At this point, I’m mostly curious how this configuration would be looking, because I couldn’t find any examples.)