Podman is favored over Docker for its daemonless, rootless architecture, systemd integration, OCI compatibility, pod concepts, and auditable fork/exec model, aligning with Red Hat security goals.

The broader value emphasizes security, maintainability, observability, automation, and resilience, suggesting suitability for self-hosted services, edge deployments, development environments, and hybrid setups.

The conclusion highlights the benefits and outlines next steps for Red Hat practitioners, along with suggestions for further reading and exploration.

A production-grade, single-host container deployment is demonstrated using Podman Quadlets and Traefik on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10, with Forgejo Git service as the practical example.

The architecture centers on three components—Forgejo (application), PostgreSQL (database), and Traefik (reverse proxy)—and employs deliberate network segmentation with a frontend IPv6 network and a backend isolated network to boost security.

Quadlets enable declarative, systemd-managed container configurations that allow native service management, automatic updates, resource control, and consistent journald logging.

The deployment flow includes enabling the Podman socket for Traefik, creating frontend and backend networks, managing secrets with Podman, configuring PostgreSQL as a quadlet, configuring Forgejo with Traefik labels and dual networks, setting up Traefik as the TLS-enabled reverse proxy via Let’s Encrypt, wiring systemd units, and enabling automatic image updates via podman-auto-update.timer.

Advanced topics cover SELinux integration with volume labeling (:z), resource limits via systemd, container health checks, monitoring through journald, and security considerations such as no-root access, TLS termination, and security headers.

The article argues that this approach provides a practical, production-grade deployment path on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10, using Podman Quadlets and Traefik with Forgejo as a concrete example.