podman is a simple client only tool to help with debugging issues when daemons such as CRI runtime and the kubelet are not responding or failing. A shared API layer could be created to share code between the daemon and podman. podman does not require any daemon running. podman utilizes the same underlying components that crio uses i.e. containers/image, container/storage, oci-runtime-tool/generate, runc or any other OCI compatible runtime. podman shares state with crio and so has the capability to debug pods/images created by crio.