You don't need Kubernetes - or even a cloud provider - to run containers reliably in production. In this talk, we'll explore how Podman, systemd, and Quadlet let you operate containerized services on classic Linux VMs while preserving digital sovereignty and keeping your stack understandable.
In a hands-on session, you'll experience what you get from a systemd- native setup: rootless containers as regular services that start on boot, log to the journal, define clear dependencies, and can be combined into groups that share localhost. While at it, we'll compare these capabilities to running the same workloads via docker-compose, to see where it remains a good fit and what your options are should you ever need a full-blown orchestrator.