LXD is a next generation system container manager. It offers a user experience similar to virtual machines but using Linux containers instead.

It's image based with pre-made images available for a wide number of Linux distributions and is built around a very powerful, yet pretty simple, REST API.

To get a better idea of what LXD is and what it does, you can try it online! Then if you want to run it locally, take a look at our getting started guide.

The LXD project was founded and is currently led by Canonical Ltd with contributions from a range of other companies and individual contributors.