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 |
| Boxes | View, access, and manage remote and virtual systems |
| virt-manager | Desktop tool for managing virtual machines via libvirt |
| Incus | Modern, secure and powerful system container and virtual machine manager |
| Quickgui | Gaphical user interface for the Quickemu virtual machine manager. |
| Cassowary | Run Windows virtual machine on Linux |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
 Explore our comprehensive directory of recommended free and open source software. Our carefully curated collection spans every major software category.This directory is part of our ongoing series of informative articles for Linux enthusiasts. It features hundreds of detailed reviews, along with open source alternatives to proprietary solutions from major corporations such as Google, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, IBM, Cisco, Oracle, and Autodesk. You’ll also find interesting projects to try, hardware coverage, free programming books and tutorials, and much more. Discovered a useful open source Linux program that we haven’t covered yet? Let us know by completing this form. |