Linux containers (LXC)[1] technology has taken off with Docker https://www.docker.com/ [2][3] which was released as open source in March 2013. RedHat and others have collaborated with the corporate backer to the technology seemingly to compete with Canonical's JuJu https://juju.ubuntu.com/ and Charm technology which also is based on Linux containers. Linux containers are built into the linux kernel, and so offer a lightweight native method of virtualization compared to more traditional (heavyweight) virtualization techniques like VMWare, Vagrant, VirtualBox.
Essentially, the difference is the hypervisor and OS. Whereas containers are implemented with kernel features like namespaces, cgroups and chroots, a full VM requires a hypervisor plus an operating system in the VM.
Bring your own Node
Docker Cloud lets you use your own host as a node to run containers. In order to do this, you have to first install the Docker Cloud Agent.
curl -Ls https://get.cloud.docker.com/ | sudo -H sh -s 7521e_PRIVATEKEY_7521e
And you must have incoming port 2375 open plus have 6783tcp/udp open
The following Linux distributions are supported:
- Ubuntu 14.04, 15.04
- Debian 8
- Centos 7
- RedHat Linux 7
- Fedora 21, 22
Pricing
Pricing depends on whether it's cloud or premise (datacenter), and ranges from $15/mo for a single node in the cloud to $150 or $300/mo per node for datacenter engine depending on the level of support.[4]
Installing on Ubuntu
https://docs.docker.com/installation/ubuntulinux/ Apparently the packaged version is old (not surprising). So, add the Docker repo, and install lxc-docker
Note: it's only supported on 64-bit Ubuntu