It’s definitely the goal of Incus to provide a near identical experience whether you’re running it on your laptop or in a large production cluster. That’s what really simplifies operation and its use in general.
That’s also why we’re spending time on things like Incus OS to standardize some of those bits even more, basically so that for most folks, you won’t even need to really care about the Linux OS management side of things.
You obviously still will on your laptop as that won’t be running Incus OS, but for any other deployments, whether it’s a home lab, office environment or datacenter, you’ll be able to use the exact same OS image and have the exact same behavior everywhere.
That may not necessarily fit everyone, there are obviously folks who want Incus to sit alongside other things on their servers, for those folks, using the same Incus packages as you’d use on a laptop, but possibly using Incus Deploy to deploy and manage those systems will still be supported and makes that pretty easy.
We’re also now looking ahead at what to do once we do have Incus OS ready for prime time.
The next obvious piece we’ll be focusing on is on deploying internal services on top of that Incus deployment (whether standalone or cluster). That means deploying things like a load-balancer for the API, the support services for Ceph, OVN or Linstor, an authentication/authorization stack, a monitoring stack, …
Our current plan around that is to make use of Incus’ OCI support so we can just have a bunch of simple, pre-tweaked, pre-tested application container images for those services, then have logic in Incus OS to automatically create an internal project and deploy the needed services to offer a fully functional production environment.
That’s basically the next step in ensuring that basically all Incus deployments will behave the same way, now expanding that to storage/network operation, authentication/authorization and monitoring.