And it’s finally out, our first LTS (Long Term Support) release of Incus!

For anyone unfamiliar, Incus is a modern system container and virtual machine manager developed and maintained by the same team that first created LXD. It’s released under the Apache 2.0 license and is run as a community led Open Source project as part of the Linux Containers organization.

Incus provides a cloud-like environment, creating instances from premade images and offers a wide variety of features, including the ability to seamlessly cluster up to 50 servers together.

It supports multiple different local or remote storage options, traditional or fully distributed networking and offers most common cloud features, including a full REST API and integrations with common tooling like Ansible, Terraform/OpenTofu and more!

The LTS release of Incus will be supported until June 2029 with the first two years featuring bug and security fixes as well as minor usability improvements before transitioning to security fixes only for the remaining 3 years.

The highlights for existing Incus users are:

• Swap limits for containers
• New shell completion mechanism
• Creation of external bridge interfaces
• Live-migration of VMs with disks attached
• System information in incus info --resources
• USB information in incus info --resources

For those coming from LXD 5.0 LTS, a full list of changes is included in the announcement as well as some instructions on how to migrate over.

The full announcement and changelog can be found here.
And for those who prefer videos, here’s the release overview video:

You can take the latest release of Incus up for a spin through our online demo service at: https://linuxcontainers.org/incus/try-it/

And as always, my company is offering commercial support on Incus, ranging from by-the-hour support contracts to one-off services on things like initial migration from LXD, review of your deployment to squeeze the most out of Incus or even feature sponsorship. You’ll find all details of that here: https://zabbly.com/incus

Donations towards my work on this and other open source projects is also always appreciated, you can find me on Github Sponsors, Patreon and Ko-fi.

Enjoy!

The last Incus release before we go LTS has now been released!

This is quite the feature packed release as this is meant to include just about every features we want in Incus 6.0 LTS except for a few last minute minor additions.

You’ll find new features for just about everyone, from multi-cluster networking with the new network integrations, to enhanced performance on multi-socket servers with the improved NUMA support, to easier authentication with JSON Web Token support, to I/O limits for virtual machines and more USB passthrough options.

The full announcement and changelog can be found here.
And for those who prefer videos, here’s the release overview video:

You can take the latest release of Incus up for a spin through our online demo service at: https://linuxcontainers.org/incus/try-it/

And as always, my company is offering commercial support on Incus, ranging from by-the-hour support contracts to one-off services on things like initial migration from LXD, review of your deployment to squeeze the most out of Incus or even feature sponsorship. You’ll find all details of that here: https://zabbly.com/incus

Donations towards my work on this and other open source projects is also always appreciated, you can find me on Github Sponsors, Patreon and Ko-fi.

Enjoy!

Looking for something to do this weekend? How about trying out the all new Incus 0.6!

This Incus release is quite the feature packed one! It comes with an all new storage driver to allow a shared disk to be used for storage across a cluster. On top of that we also have support for backing up and restoring storage buckets, control over accessing of shared block devices, the ability to list images across all projects, a number of OVN improvements and more!

The full announcement and changelog can be found here.
And for those who prefer videos, here’s the release overview video:

You can take the latest release of Incus up for a spin through our online demo service at: https://linuxcontainers.org/incus/try-it/

And as always, my company is offering commercial support on Incus, ranging from by-the-hour support contracts to one-off services on things like initial migration from LXD, review of your deployment to squeeze the most out of Incus or even feature sponsorship. You’ll find all details of that here: https://zabbly.com/incus

Donations towards my work on this and other open source projects is also always appreciated, you can find me on Github Sponsors, Patreon and Ko-fi.

Enjoy!

Incus 0.5 is now out as the first release of 2024!

This is the first release featuring no imported changes from the LXD project, following Canonical’s decision to re-license LXD and add in a CLA. You’ll find details about that in one of my previous posts.

Overall, it’s a pretty busy release with a good mix of CLI improvements, new features for VM users, more flexibility around cluster evacuations and host shutdowns and a few more API improvements.

A variety of 3rd party tools have also been getting Incus support since the previous release, including, Ansible, Terraform/OpenTofu and Packer.

Also of note, we now have native distribution packages for Arch Linux, Debian, Gentoo, NixOS, Ubuntu and Void Linux. With ongoing work on a native Fedora package (COPR repo available until then).
We’ve updated our installation instructions to cover all of those!

The full announcement and changelog can be found here.
And for those who prefer videos, here’s the release overview video:

As always, you can take Incus up for a spin through our online demo service at: https://linuxcontainers.org/incus/try-it/

Just a quick reminder that my company is offering commercial support on Incus, ranging from by-the-hour support contracts to one-off services on things like initial migration from LXD, review of your deployment to squeeze the most out of Incus or even feature sponsorship.
You’ll find all details of that here: https://zabbly.com/incus

Donations towards my work on this and other open source projects is also always appreciated, you can find me on Github Sponsors, Patreon and Ko-fi.

And lastly, a quick note that I’ll be at FOSDEM next week, so if you’re attending and want to come say hi, you’ll find me in the containers devroom on Saturday and the kernel devroom on Sunday!