Incus is a modern, secure and powerful system container and virtual machine manager. The Incus project was created by Aleksa Sarai as a community driven alternative to Canonical’s LXD.
It provides a unified experience for running and managing full Linux systems inside containers or virtual machines. Incus supports images for a large number of Linux distributions (official Ubuntu images and images provided by the community) and is built around a very powerful, yet pretty simple, REST API. Incus scales from one instance on a single machine to a cluster in a full data center rack, making it suitable for running workloads both for development and in production.
Incus allows you to easily set up a system that feels like a small private cloud. You can run any type of workload in an efficient way while keeping your resources optimized.
This is free and open source software.
Key Features
- Core API:
- Secure by design (through unprivileged containers, resource restrictions, authentication, …)
- Intuitive (with a simple, clear API and crisp command line experience)
- Scalable (from containers on your laptop to clusters of thousands of compute nodes)
- Event based (providing logging, operation, and lifecycle events)
- Remote usage (same API used for local and network access)
- Project support (as a way to compartmentalize sets of images and profiles)
- Instances and profiles:
- Image based (with images for a wide variety of Linux distributions, published daily)
- Instances (containers and virtual-machines)
- Configurable through profiles (applicable to both containers and virtual machines)
- Backup and export:
- Backup and recovery (for all objects managed by Incus)
- Snapshots (to save and restore the state of an instance)
- Container and image transfer (between different hosts, using images)
- Instance migration (importing existing instances or transferring them between servers)
- Configurability:
- Multiple storage backends (with configurable storage pools and storage volumes)
- Network management (including bridge creation and configuration, cross-host tunnels, …)
- Advanced resource control (CPU, memory, network I/O, block I/O, disk usage and kernel resources)
- Device passthrough (USB, GPU, unix character and block devices, NICs, disks and paths)
Website: linuxcontainers.org/incus
Support: GitHub Code Repository
Developer: Stéphane Graber, Tom Parrott, and many other contributors
License: Apache License 2.0
Incus is written in Go. Learn Go with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Related Software
| Container Managers | |
|---|---|
| Portainer | Lightweight and easy to use management UI |
| Podman | Tool for managing OCI containers and pods |
| LXD | Manage virtual machines and containers |
| Rancher | Container management platform |
| Mesos | Cluster manager |
| virt-manager | Desktop tool for managing virtual machines via libvirt |
| Cloudmin | Manage virtual systems running virtualization technology |
| Incus | Modern, secure and powerful system container and virtual machine manager |
| Pods | Manage your Podman containers |
| Cruise | Docker TUI client |
| Stakkr | Docker recompose tool |
| rkt | Application container engine |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
| Virtualization Tools | |
|---|---|
| VirtualBox | Powerful x86 and AMD64/Intel64 virtualization software |
| Quickemu | Wrapper for QEMU that automatically “does the right thing” |
| QEMU | Machine emulator and virtualizer |
| Multipass | Lightweight virtual machine manager |
| Boxes | View, access, and manage remote and virtual systems |
| virt-manager | Desktop tool for managing virtual machines via libvirt |
| Incus | Secure and powerful system container and virtual machine manager |
| Quickgui | Gaphical user interface for the Quickemu virtual machine manager. |
| Kudu | Create and manage QEMU virtual machines from the terminal |
| Cockpit Machines | Web interface for managing virtual machines |
| Cassowary | Run Windows virtual machine on Linux |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
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