We Ditched Docker 25.0 for Podman 5.0: Lessons Learned from 100 Production Container Migrations For three years, our SaaS platform relied on Docker 25.0 to run 100+ production containers powering our core microservices, databases, and message queues. While Docker served us well initially, rising security concerns, clunky rootless support, and operational overhead pushed us to evaluate alternatives. After 6 months of testing, we migrated all 100 production containers to Podman 5.0 with zero major outages. Here’s what we learned. Why We Left Docker 25.0 Docker 25.0’s daemon-based architecture was our biggest pain point. The dockerd daemon runs as root by default, expanding our attack surface, and its rootless mode required complex workarounds that broke frequently. We also faced compatibility issues with Docker’s proprietary tooling, and rising licensing costs for enterprise features made us reconsider our stack.…