Author Archives: Stéphane Graber

About Stéphane Graber

Project leader of Linux Containers, Linux hacker, Ubuntu core developer, conference organizer and speaker.

Announcing Incus 0.6

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!

Posted in Incus, LXD, Planet Ubuntu, Zabbly | 5 Comments

Announcing Incus 0.5

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!

Posted in Incus, LXD, Planet Ubuntu, Zabbly | 1 Comment

2024

Happy new year!

2023 was quite the busy year for me with a lot of changes to get used to, the biggest of which being my departure from Canonical and going self-employed.


While I don’t expect 2024 to be quite as exciting (and that’s a good thing), I certainly expect it to be busy! Here are some of what I look forward to in 2024:

Growing the Incus user base

Incus has been quickly picking up new users over the past few things, mostly thanks to the great work of our packagers as we now have proper packages and installations instructions for Arch, Debian, Fedora, Gentoo, NixOS and Ubuntu with more coming soon!

It’s also easier than ever for folks using MacOS or Windows to interact with remote Incus servers thanks to Homebrew, Chocolatey and now WinGet packages.

We’re also starting recurring Incus Users meetings as a way to gather more valuable feedback for the development team as well as connecting users together!

Also worth noting for anyone still using LXD. We’ve started the process of phasing out access to the Linux Containers image server for LXD users. It’s something we’re doing pretty carefully and spread over a number of months, focusing on those users who have an easy migration path first.

FOSDEM 2024

FOSDEM 2024 is now just a month away and I’m very much looking forward to catching up with everyone! It’s going to be a busy weekend with us running both the Containers (Saturday) and Kernel (Sunday) devrooms, but I’m excited about all the great talks!

Schedule for containers devroom
Schedule for kernel devroom

We’re going to have Aleksandr, Christian, Tycho and myself representing LXC, LXCFS and Incus over there.

Incus LTS

As mentioned, Incus has seen a lot of interest lately and has picked up a pretty sizable user base already. But a lot more users and Linux distributions are waiting for a Long Term Support release to come out so they can use standardize on something that’s not quite as fast paced.

That’s going to happen towards the end of March or early April with the release of Incus 6.0 LTS.

The version comes as we always align all the LXC LTS projects during an LTS release, so we’ll be releasing LXC 6.0 LTS, LXCFS 6.0 LTS and Incus 6.0 LTS around the same time, with 5 years of security update across all of them, 2 years of which will see bugfixes and minor improvements also be included.

LPC 2024

In the second half of the year, we’ll be gathering in Vienna this time for the annual Linux Plumbers Conference where I hope we’ll have another edition of the containers micro-conference.

This is always a great opportunity to catch up in person with other low-level Linux developers and working together on exciting new kernel and userspace features.

Of particular interest to me is the continued work on improving user namespaces, VFS idmap mounts and new ways to handle resources limits in containers and CGroups.

Posted in Incus, Planet Ubuntu, Zabbly | Leave a comment

Announcing Incus 0.4

Just as we’re wrapping up 2023, one last Incus release!

Incus 0.4 is now out, including keepalive support in the command line tool, improved certificate management, new OVN configuration keys and the ability to create CephFS filesystems directly through Incus!

This is going to be the last release of Incus to benefit from any of the work that goes into Canonical LXD as their decision to re-license will be preventing us from taking in any additional fixes or improvements. You’ll find details about that in one of my previous posts.

Related to that change, we’ve made the decision to progressively phase out access to the Linux Containers image server for those users still on Canonical LXD. You’ll find details about the motivations and timeline for this change here.

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

Finally 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.

Enjoy the holidays and see you all in 2024!

Posted in Incus, LXD, Planet Ubuntu, Zabbly | Leave a comment

Schedule for the containers and kernel devrooms at FOSDEM 2024

It’s been a busy week for the organizers of both the containers and kernel devrooms at FOSDEM 2024!

We received just under 100 submissions in total which had to be individually reviewed and voted on by our team of 8 volunteers. Then came the usual fun of checking that all speakers can still come to FOSDEM and finally finding room on the schedule for the selected talks!

This year, FOSDEM switched platform from the old and dated Pentabarf over to Pretalx, while we obviously hit a number of odd edge cases and issues, the overall experience was a massive improvement. Voting and scheduling could all be done intuitively directly in the platform instead of having to rely on data export and spreadsheets!

And so, after a few days of voting and scheduling, I present to you the schedules for the containers and kernel devrooms at FOSDEM!

Containers (Saturday 3rd of February 2024)

Schedule: https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/track/containers/

Kernel (Sunday 4th of February 2024)

Schedule: https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/track/kernel/

See you in Brussels!

Thanks to everyone who submitted talks to either of the devrooms and thanks to everyone who helped review and vote on those submissions!

I look forward to seeing you all in Brussels at the beginning of February!

Posted in Conferences, Planet Ubuntu | Leave a comment