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Practical LXC and LXD : Linux containers for virtualization and orchestration
Kumaran S. S., Apress, New York, NY, 2017. 159 pp. Type: Book (978-1-484230-23-7)
Date Reviewed: Jan 3 2018

Virtualized environments, both virtual machines (VMs) and containers, have become the essential technologies of elastic cloud computing services. System administrators of such services frequently encounter Linux-based virtualization, in particular Linux containers (LXC). As a reminder, true virtual machines provide full operating system (OS) instances running under the control of a hypervisor hosted on a base operating system or server. Containers, on the other hand, can be thought of as collections of constrained processes with their own address and name spaces that use host OS services without an intervening hypervisor. Both VMs and containers can have their own host names and network addresses, thus presenting as virtual servers. Other examples of container-like technologies include BSD Jails and Solaris zones.

The author, a long-time maintainer and committer of open-source software for Linux, introduces Linux container technology and management tools in his brief but dense book on LXC along with LXD: the “next-generation” container manager designed to be secure, scalable, and easy to manage and monitor. The book reviews container concepts and history, and then focuses on installation of the LXC and LXD components on a variety of Linux distributions. Subsequent chapters provide example code and screen shots of the tools for creating and managing container images and templates.

The more detailed penultimate chapter presents numerous use cases for containers, such as isolated test and development environments, application and OS release testing, fully exploiting modern multiprocessor servers, live migration of container images, and even emulation of non-Intel architectures like SPARC and PowerPC using the QEMU emulator. As with many other technology discussions, container security issues are covered only briefly in the final short chapter, a complex topic worthy of its own volume. Additionally, the lack of a detailed index for the book diminishes its utility as a reference, but at 150 pages, finding terms and other details with a quick scan should suffice. The book is also available from the publisher as a PDF or ePUB file for purchasers of the print version.

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Reviewer:  Harry J. Foxwell Review #: CR145745 (1803-0123)
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