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#Deploying to Your Mesosphere Cluster with CenturyLink’s Panamax

Panamax is a powerful Docker workflow tool that makes creating containerized applications easy, and deploying them even easier. An open source project from CenturyLink Labs, Panamax allows you to create application templates, configure your containers, test them on your local machine, and deploy your application to remote hosting targets. The Panamax team is happy to announce that a Marathon remote deployment adapter is now available, making it possible to deploy to your Mesosphere cluster with Panamax, right from your browser.

###How Panamax Works Panamax runs locally on your development machine. When you install Panamax, a small virtual machine running CoreOS is booted to hold three Docker containers -- the UI, API, and cAdvisor (for monitoring). When you introduce remote deployments, this local Panamax client will talk to a remote agent and adapter -- running in the target environment -- via SSL.

Starting with local examples, you'll lear

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#Panamax Announces Remote Agent Deployments

The Panamax team is happy to announce the v.0.1 launch of the Panamax Remote Agent toolset, consisting of the Panamax Remote Agent and adapters for deploying to both Kubernetes and to a CoreOS cluster using Fleet. This marks the next step in creating a tool that simplifies Docker management for humans. Keep in mind that both Panamax and the Remote Agent are nowhere near 1.0.

As mentioned in a previous post about the evolutionary path of Panamax, the core team agreed that Panamax templates — the heart of what makes working with Panamax simple and great — should be agnostic to host, orchestration, and cluster management technology.

Previously, Panamax was able to deploy to a local, single-node configuration using Core

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Private Networks and Port Forwarding in Panamax

Panamax v0.2.3 brings some great changes to networking and port bindings that will make your time using Panamax even better. Panamax can now create a private network for you, and we've added support for automatic port mapping. Gone are the days of manually configuring your VM in order to peer into your Docker containers.

###The old way Prior to version 0.2.1, accessing your Panamax application on your local machine could be a bit of a hassle. We relied on the NAT adaptor and leveraged port forwarding to access CoresOS and the Panamax UI and API. This added some extra steps in order for you to access the applications running in Panamax.

![](https://camo.githubusercontent.com/0845a257d72b390007961ee49626abc78df3029d/68747470733a2f2f63616d6f2e67697468756275736572636f6e74656e742e636f6d2f366438343839396330626461336563396135663032663437653564383039366664613265626665622f3638373437343730336132663266373036313665363136643631373832653633363132653734363936353732333332

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#Using Kubernetes Developed by Google, Kubernetes is a cluster manager for your Docker containers. With it, you can schedule and deploy any number of container replicas onto a node cluster. The name Kubernetes originates from Greek, meaning "helmsman" or "pilot," and that's the role it will fill in your Docker workflow. Kubernetes is a solution for overseeing and managing multiple containers at scale, rather than just working with Docker on a manually-configured host.

What Docker Is... and What it Isn't

Docker and its ecosystem are great for managing images, and running containers in a specific host. But these interactions are local; Docker alone can't manage your containers across multiple nodes, or schedule and manage tasks to be completed across your cluster. Docker alone works best when you're able to manually manipulate and configure the host. But we all know that only takes us so far.

In order to manage a Docker workload on a distributed cluster,

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Working With the Docker Image Cache

When building Docker images, you'll likely need to do at least a few iterations on your Dockerfile before you get everything perfect. If you know how to use the local image cache to your advantage it can significantly speed up the Dockerfile code/build/test cycle.

In this article I'll discuss how the Docker image cache works and then give you some tips for using it effectively.

Caching Image Layers

Each instruction in your Dockerfile results in a new image layer being created and added to your local image cache. That image then becomes the parent for the image created by the next instruction (see my previous article for a detailed explanation of the image creation process). Let's look at an example:

FROM debian:wheezy