[lxc-users] LXD project status

[Sean McNamara]

I'm sure stgraber will weigh in to provide the details of the
project's long-term plans, but here are a few things to think about
meanwhile:

1. It looks like they're preparing for LXD 3.0. This hasn't taken the
shape of any stable releases since December, true, but there are
frequent beta releases -- here's the commit for beta 7 just recently,
and it seems there's been a beta approximately weekly since about the
new year. https://github.com/lxc/lxd/commit/8cc13c42f1c34408ca66b875394ffa81ff70fa59

2. A lack of consistent releases doesn't necessarily mean a project is
dead. It can mean the project is in a really good state right now and
doesn't really need improvement, or the developers are spending a lot
of time working on big new features that require a lot of work before
anything can be demoed or merged into master, even in prerelease
shape.

3. If you're planning to use LXD for a commercial purpose, I would
strongly suggest investing in paid support from Canonical to get that
extra assurance of the continuity of support longer term. They still
offer this on their website, which tells me they must be retaining
some LXD developers who can help you and actually provide that
support, including patches if you find bugs that are breaking your
production workloads. Your investment in LXD support would also go a
long way to helping ensure the project remains maintained for the
foreseeable future, even if you don't need any patches yourself.

Canonical may have had some spectacular product failures in recent
years (Ubuntu Phone, Unity among others), but I don't think LXD is
among them. And in any case, when you are assessing the activity of a
project, check the Git commit logs (including in feature branches, not
just master) rather than the releases -- releases don't say a whole
lot about a product's activity; Git commits are a finer-grained
indicator.

Good luck,

Sean



On Tue, Mar 27, 2018 at 1:19 PM, Steven Spencer <sspencerwire at gmail.com> wrote:
> This is probably a message that Stephane Graber can answer most effectively,
> but I just want to know that the LXD project is continuing to move forward.
> Our organization did extensive testing of LXD in 2016 and some follow-up
> research in 2017 and plan to utilize this as our virtualization solution
> starting in April of this year. In 2017, there were updates to LXD at least
> once a month, but the news has been very quiet since December.
>
> To properly test LXD as it would work in our environment, we did extensive
> lab work with it back in 2016 and some follow-up testing in 2017. While we
> realize that there are no guarantees in our industry, I'd just like to know
> that, at least for now, LXD is still a viable project and that development
> hasn't suddenly come to a screeching halt.
>
> Thanks for your consideration.
>
> Steve Spencer
>
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