New Open-Source Tool Makes It Easy To Tap Into Docker, The Cloud’s Next Big Thing

Your new app is brilliant; the code you’ve spent six months writing is beautiful. But when you upload it from your laptop to the web server, it just doesn’t work. You know why: your laptop’s is configured slightly differently than the server, and now you’re now going to have to spend hours — maybe days — figuring out what you need to change to make it run properly.

This is one of the biggest headaches for software developers. It’s something that a popular piece of open source software called Docker can help alleviate. And now Docker has a helper of its own, an open-source project called Panamax that makes it easier to use Docker on the cloud.

Docker packs applications into software “containers,” which contain everything required to run the application. This makes it much easier to move an application from a developer’s laptop to a server, or to migrate the app from one server to another. Since its first public release in January 2013, the software has been downloaded over 8.7 million times and attracted over 553 contributors. There are now over 10,000 Docker related projects on the code hosting and collaboration platform GitHub...