What is LXD used for?

LXD is a system container and virtual machine manager for Linux with a REST API, scaling from a single machine to a cluster, maintained by Canonical. It is a good fit for private cloud on your own hardware, development environments in system containers, and running VMs and containers on one platform.

Yes. LXD is open source under the AGPL-3.0 licence. Its source code is on GitHub at canonical/lxd and is written mainly in Go.

Yes. LXD is open source, so the software itself is free to use.

Yes. LXD can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure; there is no official hosted version.

What is LXD an alternative to?

LXD is an open-source alternative to Amazon EC2, VMware vSphere, Google Compute Engine and Azure Virtual Machines. Other open-source alternatives to Amazon EC2 include Incus, Harvester and Apache CloudStack.

Is LXD actively maintained?

Yes. The most recent commit to LXD was on 2 October 2026. The project has 4.8k stars on GitHub.

LXD: open-source alternative to Amazon EC2, VMware vSphere

About LXD

LXD manages full Linux systems running inside system containers or virtual machines, giving a unified way to run and manage both. It supports images for many Linux distributions, including official Ubuntu images and community-provided ones, and is built around a REST API.

It scales from a single instance on one machine to a cluster spanning a data center rack, so it is used for both development and production workloads. The result is something that feels like a small private cloud, where different workloads can run efficiently while resource use stays optimized. The README suggests it for containerizing separate environments, running VMs, and managing infrastructure cost-effectively.

The LXD daemon runs only on Linux, but the lxc client tool is available on most platforms, installable through Snap, Chocolatey or Homebrew. LXD is written in Go, maintained by Canonical and licensed under AGPL-3.0, with documentation and release announcements published online.

Key features

System containers and virtual machines
REST API for management
Images for many Linux distributions
Clustering across multiple machines
Client available on Linux, Windows and macOS
Snap, Chocolatey and Homebrew installation

Good fit for

→Private cloud on your own hardware
→Development environments in system containers
→Running VMs and containers on one platform

Built with: Go
Tags: lxd; containers; virtualization; linux; canonical; lxc; vm; go; private-cloud

LXD: questions and answers

What is LXD used for?: LXD is a system container and virtual machine manager for Linux with a REST API, scaling from a single machine to a cluster, maintained by Canonical. It is a good fit for private cloud on your own hardware, development environments in system containers, and running VMs and containers on one platform.
Is LXD open source?: Yes. LXD is open source under the AGPL-3.0 licence. Its source code is on GitHub at canonical/lxd and is written mainly in Go.
Is LXD free?: Yes. LXD is open source, so the software itself is free to use.
Can I self-host LXD?: Yes. LXD can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure; there is no official hosted version.
What is LXD an alternative to?: LXD is an open-source alternative to Amazon EC2, VMware vSphere, Google Compute Engine and Azure Virtual Machines. Other open-source alternatives to Amazon EC2 include Incus, Harvester and Apache CloudStack.
Is LXD actively maintained?: Yes. The most recent commit to LXD was on 2 October 2026. The project has 4.8k stars on GitHub.