ropyeett

The second Long Term Support release of Incus is now out!

This is very exciting stuff, getting much closer to the Proxmox or VMware experience!

So excited about Incus running Docker containers!

Depends what kind of commercial offerings you're considering.

If you're looking at virtualization like VMWare, Incus can run a cluster on any hardware you want with various storage and network options, letting you run your VMs and even share the cluster with different teams/people.

But unlike VMWare ESXi, Incus is software you install on a normal Linux system instead of its own OS. It also doesn't come with an official web interface though there are some options for that too.

It's a lot lighter weight than something complex like OpenStack or Kubernetes, it doesn't need dedicated infrastructure machines, the control plane is automatically distributed.

It's more similar than a Proxmox or XCP but those feel less flexible to me. But I also haven't played with them too much recently.

And of course, this is Open Source, so something like what's going on with VMWare licensing can't really happen here, but same is true for any OSS option.

This release includes a new exciting way to do cluster storage as well as a bunch of other cool features!

First release of Incus since Canonical re-licensed LXD and added a CLA, still a lot of changes and improvements.

Incus has a demo of that UI (rebranded) accessible through their online demo: https://linuxcontainers.org/incus/try-it/ (there's a "Web UI" link once started)

They can freely include Apache2 licensed code in an AGPLv3 project without having to re-license the entire project under Apache2 as it's not a copyleft license. However this doesn't make the code they included AGPLv3, that code remains Apache2 and must be declared as such.

https://ubuntu.com/legal/contributors/agreement for the details.

In short, you don't lose your own copyright but you grant them a license to do whatever they want including re-license as they wish without having to ever consult you, allowing for your code to be used within their closed source projects under any license they wish.

Looks like Canonical also messed up the licensing in their package: https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/incorrect-license-information-f...

Kubernetes is great when all your infrastructure is built around it, LXD and now Incus are great for when you have existing infrastructure that needs to keep on working. As in, turning physical systems into containers or VMs, running a local private cloud on your lab hardware, ...

Then when you want to deploy stuff with Kubernetes, you run LXD or Incus on your bare metal, create a bunch of VMs on it and deploy your K8s cluster on that, just as you would in a public cloud, but instead on your own hardware.

Looks like the LXD fork is starting to add some new features of its own on top of just catching up with what Canonical is doing.

LXD was run as part of Linux Containers with maintainers from a few different companies and hundreds of external contributors over the years.

Then Canonical, who owned the trademark on it told the team that it wanted it moved in house and rebranded Canonical LXD.

Shortly after, Stephane Graber, the project leader left Canonical.

A few weeks later, Incus started as a community fork with all the original LXD maintainers joining in and the fork moving to Linux Containers.

Incus feels like a more open protect, no focus on one distro or company, no shoving of a snap package down everyone's throat.

Will see how things go.

Incus 0.1 has been released, setting things up for this community, Canonical-less fork of LXD.

LXD is a trademark of Canonical

https://ubuntu.com/legal/trademarks