By James Labocki, Senior Director, Project Management, Red Hat
20 February 2026 – The “works on my machine” problem has been a thorn in the side of IT since the dawn of distributed development workflows. As organizations accelerate their shift to cloud-native practices, a critical gap has emerged: The tools developers use on their local workstations often don’t align with the enterprise security-centric, hardened Kubernetes environments in production. This inconsistency frequently leads to dependency errors, heightened risk of security vulnerabilities, and late-stage deployment surprises that drain productivity and increase technical debt.
In response to these challenges, Red Hat is excited to announce the general availability (GA) of the Red Hat build of Podman Desktop. This release is a direct response to the many requests from our customers who want to harness the massive momentum of the Podman Desktop community which recently celebrated over 3 million downloads. Organizations are looking to bring that same popular, user-friendly experience into the enterprise fold with an integrated and fully supported path from local development to Red Hat OpenShift, delivered with production-class security needs in mind.
Why this matters for the enterprise
As we talk about the broader developer experience, we have to address the support gap. Until now, many teams have had to rely on unsupported open source tools or alternatives that lack the service-level agreements (SLAs) required for work. The Red Hat build of Podman Desktop is a vendor-backed solution that comes with official Red Hat support, providing access to security fixes, product engineers and container experts. For IT decision-makers and platform engineers, this means more predictable lifecycle management, security patching, and the ability to manage container tools across thousands of workstations from Day 1.
Bridging the gap from desktop to production
For many developers, the desktop is where innovation begins, but it’s also where security risks can start. Traditional desktop container tools aren’t designed to resemble production environments, and lack enterprise-grade support. The Red Hat build of Podman Desktop changes the economics of this workflow by providing a downstream, enterprise-ready distribution of the Podman Desktop project. It includes:
- “Secure-by-design” architecture: Built on the same trusted technology found in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), it helps prevent accidental reliance on behaviors that are unsafe in production.
- A more consistent environment: By using local environments that more closely resemble a production cluster, it helps confirm that the workloads tested on your laptop will perform in an identical manner when deployed to the hybrid cloud.
- Tightly integrated workflows: With native Kubernetes and pod support, developers can build locally and deploy with confidence to OpenShift while limiting the risk of potential surprises.
A frictionless migration from your current tools
We know that many developers are currently standardized on other tools. That’s why we’ve worked hard to deliver a drop-in, zero-disruption replacement. The Red Hat build of Podman Desktop seamlessly supports industry-standard container workflows, including existing images, compose files, and volumes without modification.
This release is more than just a tool; it’s about empowering developers to focus on writing code rather than managing infrastructure. By providing a lightweight, high-performance, and secure local environment, Red Hat is helping organizations bridge the final mile between the developer’s desk and the production cloud. Learn more about the Red Hat build of Podman Desktop here.