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LXD vs SmartOS: What are the differences?
LXD: Daemon based on liblxc offering a REST API to manage containers. 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 hood, 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; SmartOS: Converged Container and Virtual Machine Hypervisor. It combines the capabilities you get from a lightweight container OS, optimized to deliver containers, with the robust security, networking and storage capabilities you’ve come to expect and depend on from a hardware hypervisor.
LXD and SmartOS can be primarily classified as "Virtual Machine Platforms & Containers" tools.
LXD is an open source tool with 2.37K GitHub stars and 545 GitHub forks. Here's a link to LXD's open source repository on GitHub.
lxd/lxc and Docker aren't congruent so this comparison needs a more detailed look; but in short I can say: the lxd-integrated administration of storage including zfs with its snapshot capabilities as well as the system container (multi-process) approach of lxc vs. the limited single-process container approach of Docker is the main reason I chose lxd over Docker.
Pros of LXD
- More simple10
- Open Source8
- API8
- Best8
- Cluster7
- Multiprocess isolation (not single)5
- Fast5
- I like the goal of the LXD and found it to work great5
- Full OS isolation4
- Container3
- More stateful than docker3
- Systemctl compatibility2
