They're pretty much the exact opposite of each other. LXD is something that runs things that look like VM images when they're actually running the same kernel -

They're pretty much the exact opposite of each other. LXD is something that runs things that look like VM images when they're actually running the same kernel - this is creating full (albeit lightweight) VMs to run container images. The broad approach isn't new (https://clearlinux.org/features/clear-containers https://clearlinux.org/features/clear-containers describes Intel's Clear Containers work which allows you to use rkt to run containers in individual lightweight VMs), but the trick in this case is to perform the isolation at the pod level (ie, a collection of functionally related containers) rather than the individual container level. (Edit: Apparently the Docker support for Clear Containers hasn't gone upstream, so dropped the reference to it)