[riolu]

Podman’s unofficial answer to compose is “podman compose”. The official answer is kubernetes.

Podman supports generating systemd units for “Pods” (groups of containers).

The unit files podman generates are portable. Rather than version controlling your compose.yml, you would version control your unit defining your pod.

Using a makefile you could handle installing/updating/etc your unit file.

It is an equally convenient way to manage your containers, but it does require learning and understanding how everything fits together, compose is nice because it abstracts a lot.