Category Archives: Zabbly

The FuturFusion Cloud stack

Posted on 2025/10/21 by Stéphane Graber

Besides my regular open source contributions and running my own consulting business (Zabbly), I’m also the CTO and co-founder of an Open Source company called FuturFusion where I’ve been running Engineering for well over a year now.

My main focus over there has been building the FuturFusion Cloud stack, a completely open-source private cloud solution built around Incus. As part of that, our engineering team has been hard at work over the past year or so, improving Incus itself but also building a number of other projects from the ground up to make it easy to build and operate large scale Incus deployments.

Our stack is made of 4 core components:

  • Incus itself as the private cloud platform that runs virtual machines, system containers and application containers, with full clustering and multi-tenancy as well as support for a variety of storage and networking options to fit most environments.
  • IncusOS (shipping as HypervisorOS to our customers) that acts as our base layer Operating System image running on all physical servers as well as in the virtual machines that run our other components. It’s an immutable OS image based on Debian 13 and using systemd’s tooling to provide a safe boot experience and full disk encryption through the use of UEFI Secure Boot and TPM 2.0 modules. It uses an A/B update scheme, guaranteeing no variance in software between servers and an easy rollback mechanism should something go wrong. It’s completely locked down with API-only access and optional central management through Operations Center.
  • Operations Center provides an overview of an entire deployment, keeping track of all individual servers (running HypervisorOS), centrally managing all updates, handling Incus cluster creation and then acting as a global inventory of every Incus resource across all clusters.
  • Migration Manager is our migration tool which currently focuses on migrating from VMware (vCenter or standalone ESXi) over to Incus. It can connect to a large number of source VMware environments as well as target Incus clusters. It can easily keep track of hundreds of thousands of VMs that need to be migrated, making it easy to create migration batches and schedule those over weeks or months, running regular data pre-migration and finally completing the migration during scheduled downtime windows.

I recently took a bit of time away from customer deployments to record a video of how everything fits together, including an end to end lab deployment, starting from a pre-existing VMware environment and going all the way to having two Incus clusters running and the VMware VMs fully converted to Incus VMs.

In addition, for those interested in the security aspect of things, I gave a talk a few months back about IncusOS’ security story at the Linux Security Summit in Denver, Colorado. The recording of which has since been made publicly available.

Now our focus on the engineering front is primarily in fixing some filling a few remaining gaps as well as putting together up to date comprehensive documentation on IncusOS, Migration Manager and Operations Center. This will then make it easy for anyone to get started with those as well as hopefully attract more contributors to those projects.

On the topic of contributors, none of this would have been possible without the 112 individuals who contributed to the Incus project in the past year, thank you!

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

Announcing Incus 6.17

Posted on 2025/09/29 by Stéphane Graber

The Incus team is pleased to announce the release of Incus 6.17!

This release comes with an early CLI for IncusOS users, a couple of nice enhancements to OVN networking, more flexibility for cluster users and a couple of new instance options.

The highlights for this release are:

  • IncusOS management commands
  • Tunnel support on OVN networks
  • Control over out-of-memory priority
  • Override-able configuration and devices on backup import
  • database-client cluster role
  • Support for parent=none on OVN uplink networks
  • Cluster groups in configuration preseed

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 | Leave a comment

Announcing Incus 6.16

Posted on 2025/09/01 by Stéphane Graber

The Incus team is pleased to announce the release of Incus 6.16!

This release brings in a new storage driver, the ability to install Windows VMs without having to rely on a repacked ISO and support for temporary storage in containers.

The highlights for this release are:

  • TrueNAS storage driver
  • USB CD-ROM handling for VMs
  • tmpfs and tmpfs-overlay disks for containers
  • Configurable console behavior in the CLI

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 | Leave a comment

Announcing Incus 6.15

Posted on 2025/08/03 by Stéphane Graber

The Incus team is pleased to announce the release of Incus 6.15!

This is one of those releases which has a bit of everything, improvements for application containers, VMs, clustering, networking and even some CLI enhancements.

Worth noting that we’ve also made some good progress on Incus OS and now use it to run the online demo environment. We’ve also made a new downloading tool for it with instructions available here.

The highlights for this release are:

  • Authentication support for OCI registries
  • Webhook as a logging target
  • More control over memory hotplug behavior in VMs
  • Persistent CD-ROM ejection in VMs
  • Configurable WWN for disk devices in VMs
  • Dynamic IPv6 network address
  • Configurable keepalive mode in the CLI
  • Markdown output in the CLI
  • More server-side filtering support in the CLI

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 | Leave a comment

Year two of freelancing

Posted on 2025/07/07 by Stéphane Graber

Introduction

It was exactly two years ago today that I left my day job as Engineering Manager of LXD at Canonical and went freelance. I wrote about the one year experience last year, so here’s another update for what happened since!

Zabbly

As a reminder, Zabbly is the company I created for my freelance work. Most of it is Incus related these days, though I also make and publish some mainline kernel builds, ZFS packages and OVS/OVN packages!

On top of that, Zabbly also owns my various ARIN resources (ASN, allocations, …) as well as my hosting/datacenter contracts.

Through Zabbly I offer a mix of by-the-hour consultation with varying prices depending on the urgency of the work (basic consultation, support, emergency support) as well as fixed-cost services, mostly related to Incus (infrastructure review, migration from LXD, remote or on-site trainings, …).

Zabbly is also the legal entity for donations related to my open source work, currently supporting:

And lastly, Zabbly also runs a Youtube channel covering the various projects I’m involved with.
That part grew quite a bit over the past year, with subscriber count up 75%, frequent live streams and release videos. The channel is now part of the YouTube Partner program.

FuturFusion

In addition to the work I’m doing through Zabbly. I’m also the CTO and co-founder of FuturFusion.

FuturFusion is focused on providing a full private cloud solution to enterprise customers, primarily those looking for an alternative to VMware. The solution is comprised of:

  • Incus clusters
  • Hypervisor OS (based on Incus OS)
  • Operations Center (provisioning, global inventory, update management, ..)
  • Migration Manager (seamless VMware to Incus migrations)

While Zabbly is just a one person show, FuturFusion has a global team and offers 24/7 support.

All components of the FuturFusion Cloud suite are fully open-source (Apache 2.0).
FuturFusion customers get access to fully tested and supported builds of the software stack.

Incus

A lot has been going on with Incus over the past year!

Some of the main feature highlights are:

  • OCI application containers support
  • Automatic cluster re-balancing
  • Windows support for the VM agent
  • Linstor storage driver
  • Network address sets
  • A lot of OVN improvements (native client, ECMP for interconnect, load-balancer monitoring, ability to run isolated networks, inclusion of physical interfaces into OVN, …)
  • A lot of VM improvements (OS reporting, baseline CPU calculation, console history, import of existing QCOW2/VMDK/OVA images, live-migration of VM storage, screenshot API, IOMMU support, USB virtual devices, memory hotplug, …)

We also acquired (through Zabbly) our own MAC address prefix and transitioned all our projects over to that!

The University of Texas in Austin once again decided to actively contribute to Incus, leading to dozens of contributions by students, clearing quite a bit of our feature request backlog.

And I can’t talk about recent Incus work without talking about Incus OS. This is recent initiative to build our own immutable OS image, just to run Incus. It’s designed to be as safe as possible and easy to operate at large scale. I recently traveled to the Linux Security Summit to talk about it.

Two more things also happened that are definitely worth mentioning, the first is the decision by TrueNAS Scale to use Incus as the built-in virtualization solution. This has introduced Incus to a LOT of new people and we’re looking forward to some exciting integration work coming very soon!

The other is a significant investment from the Sovereign Tech Fund, funding quite a bit of Incus work this year, from our work on LTS bugfix releases to the aforementioned Windows agent and a major refresh of our development lab!

NorthSec

NorthSec is a yearly cybersecurity conference, CTF and training provider, usually happening in late May in Montreal, Canada. It’s been operating since 2013 and is now one of the largest on-site CTF events in the world along with having a pretty sizable conference too.

There are two main Incus-related highlights for NorthSec this year.

First, all the on-site routing and compute was running on Incus OS.
This was still extremely early days with this being (as far as I know) the first deployment of Incus OS on real server hardware, but it all went off without a hitch!

The second is that we leaned very hard on Infrastructure As Code this year, especially on the CTF part of the event. All challenges this year were published through a combination of Terraform and Ansible, using their respective providers/plugins for Incus. The entire CTF could be re-deployed from scratch in less than an hour and we got to also benefit from pretty extensive CI through Github Actions.

For the next edition we’re looking at moving more of the infrastructure over to Incus OS and make sure that all our Incus cluster configuration and objects are tracked in Terraform.

Conferences

Similar to last year, I’ve been keeping conference travel to a lower amount than I was once used to 🙂

But I still managed to make it to:

  • Linux Plumbers Conference 2024 (in Vienna, Austria)
    • Ran the containers & checkpoint/restore micro-conference and talked about immutable process tags
  • FOSDEM 2025 (in Brussels, Belgium)
  • Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management & BPF Summit (in Montreal, Canada)
  • Linux Security Summit 2025 (in Denver, Colorado)

This will likely be it as far as conference travel for 2025 as I don’t expect to make it in person to Linux Plumbers this year, though I intend to still handle the CFP for the containers/checkpoint-restore micro-conference and attend the event remotely.

What’s next

I expect the coming year to be just as busy as this past year!

Incus OS is getting close to its first beta, opening it up to wider usage and with it, more feature requests and tweaks! We’ve been focusing on its use for large customers that get centrally provisioned and managed, but the intent is for Incus OS to also be a great fit for the homelab environment and we have exciting plans to make that as seamless as possible!

Incus itself also keeps getting better. We have some larger new features coming up, like the ability to run OCI images in virtual machines, the aforementioned TrueNAS storage driver, a variety of OVN improvements and more!

And of course, working with my customers, both through Zabbly and at FuturFusion to support their needs and to plan for the future!

Posted in Conferences, Incus, LXC, LXCFS, Planet Ubuntu, Zabbly | 1 Comment