LXD and Docker

This blog post is not about the technical details around LXC, LXD, Docker, Kubernetes, etc. It focuses on the different use cases LXD and Docker are solving and should help non-experts understand them.

Canonical demoed a prototype of LXD last week at ODS. Several journalists incorrectly understood that LXD is a competitor of Docker. The truth is that LXD is trying to solve a completely different use case than Docker. Ubuntu 14.04 was the first operating system to provide commercial support for Docker. Six times more Docker images are powered by Ubuntu than all other operating systems combined. Ubuntu loves Docker.

Different Use Cases?

Docker is focused on being the universal container for applications. Developers love Docker because it allows them to prototype quickly solutions and share them with others. Docker is best compared to an onion. All internal layers are read-only and only the last layer is writeable. This means that people can quickly reuse Docker containers that were made by others and add their own layers on top if desired. Afterwards you upload your “personalised onion” to the Docker hub hence others can benefit from your work. Docker is ideal for augmenting developer productivity and showing of innovations.

Canonical is the company behind Ubuntu and Ubuntu powers 64% of all OpenStack’s in production, the fastest growing open source project in the world. In OpenStack, like in VMWare or on AWS, you run a hypervisor on a host operating system and then install a guest operating system on top. Because you have two layers of operating systems you can host on one server many applications on multiple operating systems at the same time. This is greatly optimising resource usage over non-virtualization. However because you need to duplicate operating systems you are wasting a lot of resources. Now ideally you could put Docker directly inside OpenStack and run all applications from inside containers. The problem with this is that Docker does not give an administrator the possibility to remotely log into the container and just add some monitoring, backup, etc. and other normal activities administrators do to guarantee SLAs. In comes LXD. LXD is building on top of a container technology called LXC which was used by Docker before. However LXD allows you to have access to a virtual server, just like you would have in case of a hypervisor. The big difference is that LXD does not require operating systems to be duplicated. Instead it partitions the host operating system and assures fair and secure usage between different applications that run inside different containers. The result is that the same server can pack many more applications and startup as well as migrations of applications between different servers becomes extremely fast. This idea is not new. Mainframes already had containers. Solaris had containers. LXD just makes sure that your favourite private cloud has containers that are easy to manage.

Can a hypervisor, Docker and LXD coexist?

Yes. The hypervisor could make sure Windows runs on top of an Ubuntu host [linux containers can not support Windows on top]. Docker containers can host some next generation scale out solution that is either purpose build for Docker or has made changes to support some of the new paradigms Docker introduces. LXD will be best for all your standard Linux workloads that you just want to move as is. No need to update the applications or the tools that get integrated into them.
Since LXD has an Apache licence and is available on Github, it is very likely that the future will actually evolve into a world where LXD and Docker advantages get combined in some shape or form. Hopefully with new innovations being added as well. That is the power of open source innovation and exactly the reason why Canonical has shared LXD with the world…