I’d expected this but it still sucks.
OK, I can definitely see how your professional experiences as described would lead to this amount of distrust. I work in data centres myself, so I have plenty of war stories of my own about some of the crap we’ve been forced to work with.
But, for my self-hosted needs, Proxmox has been an absolute boon for me (I moved to it from a pure RasPi/Docker setup about a year ago).
I’m interested in having a play with LXD/Incus, but that’ll mean either finding a spare server to try it on, or unpicking a Proxmox node to do it. The former requires investment, and the latter is pretty much a one-way decision (at least, not an easy one to rollback from).
Something I need to ponder…
OK, I can definitely see how your professional experiences as described would lead to this amount of distrust. I work in data centres myself, so I have plenty of war stories of my own about some of the crap we’ve been forced to work with.
It’s not just the level of distrust, is the fact that we eventually moved all those nodes to LXD/Incus and the amount of random issues in day to day operations dropped to almost zero. LXD/Incus covers the same ground feature-wise (with a very few exceptions that frankly didn’t also work properly under Proxmox), is free, more auditable and performs better under the continuous high loads you expect on a datacenter.
When it performs that well on the extreme case, why not use for self-hosting as well? :)
I’m interested in have a play with LXD/Incus, but that’ll mean either finding a spare server to try it on, or unpicking a Proxmox node to do it.
Well you can always virtualize under a Proxmox node so you get familiar with it ahaha
How is the development of LXD?
I am a huge fan of LXC, but I hate random daemons running (so no Docker for me). I have been looking at the Linux Container website, and they mentioned Canonical taking LXD development under its wings, and something about no one else participating apart from Canonical devs.
So I’m kind of scared about the future of LXC and Incus. Do you have any more information about that?
So I’m kind of scared about the future of LXC and Incus. Do you have any more information about that?
Canonical decided to take LXD away from the Linux Containers initiative and “close it” by changing the license. Meanwhile most of the original team at Canonical that made both LXC and LXD into a real thing quit Canonical and are not working on Incus or somehow indirectly “on” the Linux Containers initiative.
no one else participating apart from Canonical devs.
Yes, because everyone is pushing code into Incus and the team at Canonical is now very, very small and missing the key people.
The future is bright and there’s money to make things happen from multiple sources. When it comes to the move from LXD to Incus I specifically asked stgraber about what’s going to happen in the future to the current Debian LXD users and this was his answer:
We’ve been working pretty closely to Debian on this. I expect we’ll keep allowing Debian users of LXD 5.0.2 to interact with the image server either until trixie is released with Incus available OR a backport of Incus is made available in bookworm-backports, whichever happens first.
As you can see, even the LTS LXD version present on Debian 12 will work for a long time. Eventually everyone will move to Incus in Debian 13 and LXD will be history.
Update: here’s an important part of the Incus release announcement:
The goal of Incus is to provide a fully community led alternative to Canonical’s LXD as well as providing an opportunity to correct some mistakes that were made during LXD’s development which couldn’t be corrected without breaking backward compatibility.
In addition to Aleksa, the initial set of maintainers for Incus will include Christian Brauner, Serge Hallyn, Stéphane Graber and Tycho Andersen, effectively including the entire team that once created LXD.
Excelent write-up, thank you very much. I’m going to invest my time to learning Incus!
