Comment by goku12
1 day ago
Incus is like a cloud management software - especially in cluster mode. It has management API like many cloud services. So, yes, there's a terraform provider for Incus, which can be used to configure and provision instances. Guest setup can be managed using cloud-init. Ansible is also an alternative option for this.
Or even one of each, since cloud-init has an ansible hook: https://cloudinit.readthedocs.io/en/latest/reference/modules... for something like ansible-pull behavior
Yes. Thanks! The entire cloud computing ecosystem is a hot mess of numerous tools with countless interdependencies.
Very clear! And would it make sense to run it on a GCP VM, and use it as a "nicer docker-compose" ? Or that would entirely miss the point?
Incus is sort of like GCP's own resource management software, though GCP does a lot more than what Incus does. So you'd often be using Incus like a self-hosted alternative to GCP.
Meanwhile, running Incus inside GCP VM(s) should be possible, though I haven't tried it and can't confirm it. Incus can manage system containers - containers that behave like VMs running full distros, except for the kernel.
But keep in mind that Incus is more like docker than docker-compose. You will need a different tool to provision and configure all those containers over Incus's API (docker-compose does this for application containers over the docker API). As mentioned before, that could be Terraform/OpenTofu, cloud-init and Ansible. Or you could even write a script to do it over the API. I have done this using Python.