Migrating to Podman 5
ECE
This guide describes the supported ways to upgrade or migrate your Elastic Cloud Enterprise (ECE) hosts to Podman 5. There are two primary methods:
In-place upgrade: Update Podman directly on existing ECE hosts without replacing them. In-place upgrades to Podman 5 are only supported from existing Podman-based hosts.
Grow-and-shrink upgrade: Add new hosts running the desired Podman version to your ECE installation, then remove the old ones. This method is safer and preferred, as it avoids potential risks associated with upgrading the container engine or the operating system in place.
ECE only supports Podman 5 in version 5.2.2, regardless of your upgrade method. Later versions such as 5.2.3 and above are not supported. Refer always to the official Support matrix for details on supported versions.
Podman versions 5.2.2-11 and 5.2.2-13 are affected by a known memory leak issue. To avoid this issue, use a later build such as 5.2.2-16 or newer.
The following table summarizes the supported upgrade paths to Podman 5 in ECE.
| From ↓ ... To → | Podman 5.2.2-latest | Podman 5.2.3 |
|---|---|---|
| <vanilla Linux installation> (grow) | ✓ | X |
| Docker (grow-and-shrink) | ✓ | X |
| Podman 4.9.4 (grow-and-shrink) | ✓ | X |
| Podman 4.9.4 (in-place) | ✓ | X |
| Podman 5.2.2 (grow-and-shrink) | ✓ | X |
| Podman 5.2.2 (in-place) | ✓ | X |
As shown in the table above, migrations from Docker are only supported using the grow-and-shrink method.