LXD is a container "hypervisor" and a new user experience for LXC (Linux Containers).
LXD is a container "hypervisor" and a new user experience for LXC.
Specifically, it's made of three components:
- A system-wide daemon (lxd)
- A command line client (lxc)
- An OpenStack Nova plugin (nova-compute-lxd)
- The daemon exports a REST API both locally and if enabled, over the network.
The command line tool is designed to be a very simple, yet very powerful tool to manage all your containers. It can handle connect to multiple container hosts and easily give you an overview of all the containers on your network, let you create some more where you want them and even move them around while they're running.
The OpenStack plugin then allows you to use your lxd hosts as compute nodes, running workloads on containers rather than virtual machines.
The LXD project was founded and is currently led by Canonical Ltd and Ubuntu with contributions from a range of other companies and individual contributors.
Features
Some of the biggest features of LXD are:
- Secure by design (unprivileged containers, resource restrictions and much more)
- Scalable (from containers on your laptop to thousand of compute nodes)
- Intuitive (simple, clear API and crisp command line experience)
- Image based (no more distribution templates, only good, trusted images)
- Live migration
Relationship with LXC
LXD isn't a rewrite of LXC, in fact it's building on top of LXC to provide a new, better user experience. Under the scene, LXD uses LXC through liblxc and its Go binding to create and manage the containers.
It's basically an alternative to LXC's tools and distribution template system with the added features that come from being controllable over the network.
