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Comment by oulipo | Hacker News Reader

Is there some kind of Terraform/Pulumi integration to make it easy to deploy stuff to some VM running Incus for my deployments? Or I'm missing the point of what Incus is for?

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There is a Terraform provider that is actively maintained, in addition to Ansible integration. https://linuxcontainers.org/incus/docs/main/third_party/

I'm a Pulumi user myself, and I haven't seen a Pulumi provider for Incus yet. Once I get further into my Incus experiments, if someone hasn't made an Incus provider yet, I'll probably go through the TF provider conversion process.

That would be quite useful indeed!

Note that you can now use TF providers "on the fly" from Pulumi: https://www.pulumi.com/blog/any-terraform-provider. No provider bridging/conversion necessary.

I just tried and it seems to have worked (though I haven't tested any specific resources yet):

$ pulumi package add terraform-provider lxc/incus

Oh this is exciting! I didn't know about this, thanks for sharing!

Incus is like a cloud management software - especially in cluster mode. It has management API like many cloud services. So, yes, there's a terraform provider for Incus, which can be used to configure and provision instances. Guest setup can be managed using cloud-init. Ansible is also an alternative option for this.

Or even one of each, since cloud-init has an ansible hook: https://cloudinit.readthedocs.io/en/latest/reference/modules... for something like ansible-pull behavior

Yes. Thanks! The entire cloud computing ecosystem is a hot mess of numerous tools with countless interdependencies.

Very clear! And would it make sense to run it on a GCP VM, and use it as a "nicer docker-compose" ? Or that would entirely miss the point?

Incus is sort of like GCP's own resource management software, though GCP does a lot more than what Incus does. So you'd often be using Incus like a self-hosted alternative to GCP.

Meanwhile, running Incus inside GCP VM(s) should be possible, though I haven't tried it and can't confirm it. Incus can manage system containers - containers that behave like VMs running full distros, except for the kernel.

But keep in mind that Incus is more like docker than docker-compose. You will need a different tool to provision and configure all those containers over Incus's API (docker-compose does this for application containers over the docker API). As mentioned before, that could be Terraform/OpenTofu, cloud-init and Ansible. Or you could even write a script to do it over the API. I have done this using Python.

You could use cloud-init

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