LXD, a system container manager, a tool for LXC
before the news which was released a few weeks ago by CanonicalWithAbout changing the development model of LXD as a business project, rather than a stand-alone community project, Incus has been created in response to it.
For those who are unaware of LXD, you should know that this provides tools for centralized container management deployed in a cluster of several servers. the tool kit LXC is used as the runtime to run containers and LXD is implemented as a background process that accepts requests over the network via a REST API and supports multiple storage backends, state snapshots, live migration of running containers from one machine to another, and container tools image storage.
And is that after 8 years of development as part of Linux Containers, canonically, who is the creator and main developer of LXD, decided that it was the most optimal for LXD development. This decision led to moving the LXD code from the lxc/lxd repository to canonical/lxd , and the project's home page became ubuntu.com/lxd, and continuous integration for LXD will be migrated to Canonical's servers.
This movement has raised many concerns to the developers, since one of the problems that worries the most is the additional code added to LXD, which is required to run in snap format and make LXD more difficult to use and test.
On this, Mark Shuttleworth, stated that Canonical does not intend to stop supporting other distributions in LXD, and that the project continues to develop publicly on GitHub and accepts fixes and changes from other contributors.
It is because of that In response to this, the "Forks" were created, Incus, that curiously there are two and coincide in the same name, but that they were created by different people, one by Alexa Sarai, who works for SUSE and maintains the LXD packages in the openSUSE project and the other by Stéphane Graber, former leader of the LXD project.
About the latter, Stephane Graber, I would like to mention that rannounced his position as LXD project leader, a week after Canonical took over LXD, since it does not intend to sign a CLA agreement with Canonical. Stefan created a fork of LXD, also under the name Incus and that in his comment on the announcement of the new fork, from Alexa Sarai, Stefan confirmed that the second fork repository should be considered the main one.
About the new fork by Alexa Sarai it is mentioned that it is intended to develop a fork of the LXD container management system. The fork was created out of concern that Canonical will no longer properly support other distros on LXD, since as mentioned within Canonical's plans to focus on delivering LXD in the snap format, which is positioned as the primary format for install LXD.
And it is that in particular, most LXD users are not on Ubuntu, but on the ChromeOS platform, which uses the Gentoo Linux ebuild/portage build tool.
Incus (by Alexa Sarai) is currently working on removing redundant dependencies and disable links to tools and technologies specific to Canonical products. The development of the fork will be carried out with the participation of the community and taking into account the interests of third-party projects.
It is mentioned that the fork was made in the LXD 5.16 release, which makes it possible to upgrade from LXD versions up to and including LXD 5.16. Upgrading from a later version of LXD may not work as the two projects will likely start to diverge from this point on.
Incus will continue to monitor and import relevant LXD changes over time, although changes and features that are specific to Ubuntu or Canonical products are unlikely to be ported.
Finally, if you are interested in knowing more about it, you can check the details in the following link