You can use Podman instead of Docker to deploy Ansys HPC Platform Core Services. Ansys has tested Podman on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9. The minimum supported version is Podman 5.4.0.

Ansys HPC Platform Services (HPS) does NOT support the podman-compose executable. Although similar to docker-compose, it does not provide the same level of functionality as docker-compose.

HPS does support podman compose with docker compose as a backend. podman compose acts as a lightweight wrapper over external Compose providers such as docker-compose or podman-compose, forwarding all Compose operations to whichever provider is installed. For more information, see the podman compose documentation.

You must use podman-remote, as Docker requires a user-based API socket (assuming rootless mode).