Public procurement notice: Voluntary Ex Ante Transparency Notice
Published: 2024-11-18
Region: DE300
Contract type: Services
Procedure: Negotiated without a prior call for competition
CPV classification: 73110000 | 73300000

Technical requirements: As a research and development service, the contract is excluded from the scope of public procurement law (cf. § 116(1)(2) GWB).
Incus is used in cloud computing, software development, and organisational IT formanaging software containers and virtual machines efficiently. It supports deployments that scale from single instances to full data center clusters, making it useful in industries that require private clouds and or distributed IT infrastructure.
Additionally, it has important applications in education and research by enabling isolated experimental environments
It is widely used in open source software development as well, for example in Continuous Integration platforms like Debian's autopkgtest for testing in containers or virtual machines. Incus’s particular relevance lies in its ability to provide a comprehensive, open-source alternative to more complex and commercial solutions, making advanced cloud capabilities accessible to a broader audience.
By also contributing to the Linux kernel and other core technologies, Incus drives innovation in container and virtualization technologies, benefiting a variety of developers and organizations. It serves the public interest by promoting open source principles, enabling scalable and secure infrastructure solutions without
the need for costly proprietary software.
The primary challenges include ensuring long-term support (LTS) for releases, having proper automated and manual testing environments for the various features we need to support, managing a backlog of issues, and enhancing feature development.
To address these, this work proposes to set aside more time to track and backport fixes to the LTS branches, significant improvements to the lab environment which
is used both by contributors during development and by the automated QA tests, expand the number of platforms and deployment methods to get Incus up and
running and add more security features.
These activities will improve the maintenance and reliability of the project, and ease adoption in critical applications, directly aligning with STF’s mission of fostering sustainable and impactful open-source infrastructure. Additionally, investing in maintenance and testing will ensure the stability and security of Incus, benefiting the broader community and supporting public interest in robust, opensource technology solutions.
Incus is an open-source container and virtual machine manager designed to offer a full cloud experience with minimal footprint, suitable for devices ranging from Raspberry Pi to large server clusters. It is part of the Linux Containers organization, alongside projects like LXC and LXCFS. Incus aims to provide a robust, lightweight alternative to traditional solutions like VMWare and OpenStack.
It integrates deeply with the Linux kernel, enabling advanced container and virtualization features. The project leverages user namespaces, cgroup namespaces, and seccomp notifiers to enhance security and usability.
Incus is used in cloud computing, software development, and organisational IT formanaging software containers and virtual machines efficiently. It supports deployments that scale from single instances to full data center clusters, making it useful in industries that require private clouds and or distributed IT infrastructure.
Additionally, it has important applications in education and research by enabling isolated experimental environments.
It is widely used in open source software development as well, for example in Continuous Integration platforms like Debian's autopkgtest for testing in containers or virtual machines. Incus’s particular relevance lies in its ability to provide a comprehensive, open-source alternative to more complex and commercial solutions, making advanced cloud capabilities accessible to a broader audience.
By also contributing to the Linux kernel and other core technologies, Incus drives innovation in container and virtualization technologies, benefiting a variety of developers and organizations. It serves the public interest by promoting open source principles, enabling scalable and secure infrastructure solutions without
the need for costly proprietary software.
The primary challenges include ensuring long-term support (LTS) for releases, having proper automated and manual testing environments for the various features we need to support, managing a backlog of issues, and enhancing feature development.
To address these, this work proposes to set aside more time to track and backport fixes to the LTS branches, significant improvements to the lab environment which
is used both by contributors during development and by the automated QA tests, expand the number of platforms and deployment methods to get Incus up and
running and add more security features.
These activities will improve the maintenance and reliability of the project, and ease adoption in critical applications, directly aligning with STF’s mission of fostering sustainable and impactful open-source infrastructure. Additionally, investing in maintenance and testing will ensure the stability and security of Incus, benefiting the broader community and supporting public interest in robust, opensource technology solutions.