I'm actually good friends with a couple of the maintainers of lxc/lxd :P. It's not really fair to call it "Canonical's" -- it existed before the lead developers

I'm actually good friends with a couple of the maintainers of lxc/lxd :P. It's not really fair to call it "Canonical's" -- it existed before the lead developers started working for Canonical and it still gets plenty of contributions from outside of Canonical. lxc and lxd have quite a large amount of very interesting technology and features. lxd has live migration and a whole host of other cool features, and lxc is quite well designed from my experience. Also the developers are quite clever folks IMO. I've been bouncing some of my ideas for a new container runtime off them, since they also have seen the issues I've seen with the current state of things. The big difference is that lxc/lxd is designed to "boot" an operating system as a container, not just to run a single application. While there is actually no significant technical difference between the two usecases, the features that have grown out of each runtime are tailored for those usecases. lxc lets you log into a console (in the same way you would on a physical box) and do a full getty login. runc has tools for managing containers in a far more "micro-service" sense. I really wish that the lxc folks had helped us with the OCI, but I have a feeling their usecases are so different to us that it's unlikely we could reach agreement in the spec. Overall though, lxc definitely has a place and it's a shame more people don't try it out.