The second Long Term Support release of Incus is now out!
206 karma · joined October 2, 2020
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.
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.
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.
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.