Linux Containers Release Incus 0.4

The Incus team has announced the release of Incus 0.4, the latest version of their system container and virtual machine manager. This release is particularly significant as it marks the last release of Incus to feature changes coming from LXD, as Incus has now become fully independent.

Incus 0.4 introduces several exciting new features, including a built-in keep-alive mode in the client tool, improvements to certificate/trust store management, new OVN configuration keys, and the ability to directly create CephFS filesystems. Additionally, Incus 0.4 brings significant improvements to both OpenFGA and OVN handling, setting the infrastructure in place for upcoming new features.

One of the standout features of Incus 0.4 is the new keep-alive support in the CLI client. Users can set a keepalive configuration key on a remote in ~/.config/incus/config.yml, defining how long to keep a background connection with the Incus server. This feature significantly reduces latency and provides up to a 30% performance improvement for use cases that involve a lot of incus commands, such as Ansible.

Another notable addition in Incus 0.4 is the description field for certificate entries. This brings certificate entries in line with other Incus objects and enhances the overall user experience.

The incus config trust list command has also been reworked in this release to show more useful columns by default, including the description column. These columns are now configurable, providing users with more control over their configurations.

In terms of infrastructure improvements, Incus 0.4 introduces OVN SSL keys as server configuration. This allows users to specify SSL certificates and keys to access OVN, taking precedence over any keys found in /etc/ovn/.

Additionally, CephFS filesystems can now be directly created in Incus. Users can set the cephfs.create_missing config key to true and specify the OSD pool to consume, allowing Incus to create a new CephFS filesystem.

Users of LXD are also advised that access to the community image server (images: remote) will be phased out over a period of around 5 months. It is recommended that LXD users running non-Ubuntu images start planning their migration to Incus.

For more details on this release, including the complete changelog, documentation, and available packages, please visit the Incus website.