Daily Post August 8 2025
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Incus
This is a platform designed to unify and simplify the management of system containers, application containers, and virtual machines. Created as a community-driven fork of Canonical’s LXD, Incus adopts and expands upon the vision of a single, coherent interface for managing compute workloads. It simulates a cloud-like user experience on any hardware, from laptops and individual servers to large datacenter clusters, allowing users to mix and match containers and VMs, share storage and network, and automate orchestration all with an API and command-line toolkit.
Capabilities
Incus supports three major virtualization paradigms system containers, application containers, and virtual machines. System containers leverage Linux kernel features like namespaces and cgroups for lightweight, isolated environments that share the host kernel. These are ideal for running full Linux distributions with multiple processes, much like a virtual machine, efficiently. Application containers, akin to Docker, encapsulate a single application and its dependencies for rapid deployment and scaling. For more demanding workloads or running different operating systems, Incus offers virtual machines using hardware virtualization, providing a full guest kernel and strong isolation.
A notable aspect of Incus is its image-based operation model. It supplies daily-updated images of a wide array of Linux distributions, streamlining automated provisioning and lifecycle management. This flexibility allows it to function across different environments, handling individual setups or large-scale clustered deployments. The system supports multiple storage backends, network management, resource control, device passthrough (including USB, GPU, disk, NIC), and built-in backup and snapshot functionality, supporting both data protection and easy migration between hosts.
Usability and Developer Focus
Designed for both seasoned administrators and less technical users, Incus features a clean, consistent command-line interface and a comprehensive REST API. Both local and remote instances can be managed through the same set of tools, whether accessed directly or via third-party integrations. The platform is written in Go and released under the Apache 2 license, ensuring accessibility for open development and contributions. Changes can be contributed without legal entanglements, provided they use signed-off commits in line with the Developer Certificate of Ownership.
Security and Reliability
Security is a priority for Incus. Containers run unprivileged by default, reducing risk if compromised. The system enforces resource restrictions, authentication, and isolation to limit attack surfaces. Volume snapshots, automated and manual backups, image-based transfers, and configurable access controls further help the reliability and protection of workloads managed by Incus.
Differentiation from Other Container Platforms
Incus shares some similarities with container managers like Docker and orchestration platforms such as Kubernetes or Proxmox, its scope and approach are distinct. Where as Docker, which focuses mainly on application containers, Incus is a multi-faceted orchestration system, equally at home managing full system containers and virtual machines. In contrast to Kubernetes, which is tailored for large-scale, ephemeral microservices, Incus is ideal for traditional applications, legacy workloads, or scenarios requiring both persistent VMs and fast-deploying containers under a unified interface.
Additionally, Incus does not impose a single, routable network for all instances by default. Instead, it has flexible network and storage overlays configurable to fit varied deployment needs, from simple bridges to advanced multi-node topologies. DNS and service discovery features are not provided out of the box, unlike Kubernetes with Kubelet, but can be configured using external tools or systemd for advanced users. This flexibility means that while Incus is not as “opinionated” or turnkey as some systems, it give choice to administrators to tailor their infrastructure more closely to specific requirements.
Flexibility, Scalability, and Real-World Use Cases
One of the strengths of Incus is its adaptability. It can manage workloads on a single laptop, within virtual machines in a cloud provider, or as part of a large, multi-node cluster spanning racks of physical servers. Users can compartmentalize resources and workloads using “projects,” isolating groups of containers and VMs for different teams or applications. Incus efficiently migrates workloads between hosts, supports cluster scaling, and automates lifecycle operations using event-driven hooks and a rich API.
It is especially useful for organizations or individuals who want to build their own private cloud, providing most of the functionality expected from public clouds—persistent instances, images, network and disk management, and automation but on self-owned hardware and under user control. Incus can also serve as a testbed for more complex deployments (like multi-node Kubernetes clusters) by managing the underlying nodes as containers or virtual machines.
Community, Releases, and Support
The development and stewardship of Incus are community-driven, involving many engineers originally responsible for LXD. It offers both long-term support (LTS) releases (such as Incus 6.0, supported until June 2029) and faster-moving feature releases that deliver new capabilities on a rolling basis. Packages are available for a wide range of Linux distributions, and the client utility supports Windows and macOS for remote administration. Commercial support options are also available for enterprise users.
We love Proxmox but after some time working with Incus we started to think about shifting just a bit
https://linuxcontainers.org/incus/