LXD is a container hypervisor for managing LXC by Ubuntu. LXD is a daemon which provides a REST API for running containers and managing related resources. LXD containers provide the same user experience as traditional VMs, but using LXC, which provides similar runtime performance to containers and improved utilization over VMs. LXD containers run a full Linux OS so are typically long running, whereas Docker application containers are short-lived. This makes LXD a machine management tool that is different to Docker and is closer to software distribution.