Canonical LXD vs CoreOS Rocket [EOL] comparison

LXD is a container "hypervisor" and a new user experience for LXC. Specifically, it's made of three components: A system-wide daemon (lxd) A command line client (lxc) An OpenStack Nova plugin (nova-compute-lxd) The daemon exports a REST API both locally and if enabled, over the network. The command line tool is designed to be a very simple, yet very powerful tool to manage all your containers. It can handle connect to multiple container hosts and easily give you an overview of all the containers on your network, let you create some more where you want them and even move them around while they're running. The OpenStack plugin then allows you to use your lxd hosts as compute nodes, running workloads on containers rather than virtual machines. The LXD project was founded and is currently led by Canonical Ltd and Ubuntu with contributions from a range of other companies and individual contributors.

Rocket is an application container engine developed for modern production cloud-native environments. It features a pod-native approach, a pluggable execution environment, and a well-defined surface area that makes it ideal for integration with other systems. The core execution unit of rkt is the pod, a collection of one or more applications executing in a shared context (Rocket's pods are synonymous with the concept in the Kubernetes orchestration system). Rocket allows users to apply different configurations (like isolation parameters) at both pod-level and at the more granular per-application level. Rocket's architecture means that each pod executes directly in the classic Unix process model (i.e. there is no central daemon), in a self-contained, isolated environment. rkt implements a modern, open, standard container format, the App Container (appc) spec, but can also execute other container images, like those created with Docker.