Incus – Next-generation system container, application container, and VM manager

A little bit of context about where Incus came from:

https://lwn.net/Articles/940684/

So it looks like a Proxmox alternative, this [0] goes into some reasons to switch. Main selling point seems to be fully OSS and no enterprise version.

[0]: https://tadeubento.com/2024/replace-proxmox-with-incus-lxd/

Incus is great when developing ansible playbooks. The main benefit for me over docker/podman is systemd works out of the box in incus containers.

The only tool I found which allows to easily spin up pre-configured VMs without any gui hassle

I went through the online tutorial, but I'm not really seeing how it's different from docker?

Can someone explain the usecase for this?

Is this for people who want to run their own cloud provider, or that need to manage the infrastructure of org-owned VM's?

When would you use this over k8s or serverless container runtimes like Fargate/Cloudrun?

I first learned about this because colima supports it: https://github.com/abiosoft/colima#incus

How do you handle updating the machine that Incus itself runs on? I imagine you have to be super careful not to introduce any breakage, because then all the VMs/containers go down.

What about kernel updates that require reboots? I have heard of ksplice/kexec, but I have never seen them used anywhere.

the features worth mentioning imho are the different storage backends and their features. Using btrfs, lvm or zfs there is some level of support of thin copy provisioning and snapshotting. I believe btrfs/zfs have parity in terms of supported operations. Cheap snapshots and provisioning of both containers and VMs using the same tool is pretty awesome.

I personally use lxd for running my homelab VMs and containers

What can this work with? It says „Containers and VMs“ - I guess that’s LXCs and QEMU VMs?

Nothing about resource (net, io, disk, cpu) isolation, limits, priorities, or guarantees. Not the same as a type 1 hypervisor. These qualities are needed to run things safely and predictably in the real world™, at scale. Also, accounting and multitenancy if it's going to be used as some sort VAR or VPS offering.

Should lxc user migrate to incus?

Not to be confused with the cirrus7 incus[0], which are fanless PC models based on the ASRock DeskMini series that I'm using right now.

[0] https://www.cirrus7.com/produkte/cirrus7-incus/

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?