

Oh, are you using Podman on windows? Yeah, it needs a virtual machine because it has to load the linux kernel. I would definitely believe that the windows version (or mac, I guess) of podman is way heavier than the alternatives on those platforms, but on linux it just ends up using the host kernel.
If you are doing this on linux, and still need to load a vm to use podman, that would be interesting. I haven’t run across that, but I haven’t been able to use podman too much.
People are saying that it is a cloud managed reverse proxy, but I would not recommend using it like this. You should be running a reverse proxy on your own hardware, imo.
It is still useful because you can use it as just a proxy. You can point your dns to your cloudflare tunnel endpoint and cloudflare will screen all traffic going to your server. I’ve actually stopped using it, but it is a decent way to auto feel all the random internet traffic pitfalls like portscanning bonnets. Also putting something between your server IP and your domain is nice.