Later this week Canonical will debut a new rev of Ubuntu that features both the latest version of OpenStack and Canonical’s new “container hypervisor”, LXD. Canonical — like other companies that offer both OpenStack and containers in the same package — is responding to the demand for both technologies.

And like some of those other companies, Canonical is offering its own take on the way containers can and should work. Canonical’s LXD container runtime environment falls somewhere between a Docker container (lightweight, fast launching) and a full VM.

In addition, the applications within those containers can run without the overhead needed for virtualization. Live migration of containers — where running applications in a container can be moved between hosts — is also supported in the current release.

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