Containerization

HyperCloud enables users to create containers with LXC. LXC has a strong focus on security and isolation, and provisions system containers. Using image-based containers allows the underlying storage layer to provide the same persistent storage and snapshot capabilities that VMs benefit from in the virtualization layer.

LXC containers have some great advantages:

• Native host networking: While NAT (Network Address Translation) is possible, bridge networking is the typical model, and provides much more flexibility and power.
• Persistent storage volumes: While the compute layer and node itself is stateless, the container can choose to be a stateful container, and mount storage volumes directly.
• Control over privilege: Deployment can be privileged or unprivileged. The root user in a privileged container maps to the root user on the host. This is important for bare-metal machines.

With LXC, operators can provide tenants with a full bare-metal machine service, where instances can be an entire dedicated compute host.

In this scenario the underlying compute node becomes stateful while it's deployed in this way.