Kernel containers are used for containerization of remote execution environment, which is where the UI and notebook files are on a different computer than the Cauldron execution environment. The most common case for this would be running Cauldron on a cloud server. In this case Cauldron does all of its execution on the cloud server using a remote kernel and the UI is run another computer that is connected to the cloud server. The three possible kernel images that will always have the latest version of Cauldron are:

Or for cases where you want to pin to a specific Cauldron version the current can be replaced with a version, e.g. swernst/cauldron:1.0.0-standard.

Starting a kernel container would look something like:

--rmto cleanup the container once it is finished running,

-itto show the interactive output of the container while it is running,

-p 5010:5010to connect the container port 5010 to the remote host port 5010 so that the kernel inside the container is accessible to the remote host system. A different host port can be used by changing the first port argument in the above command if needed (for example running multiple kernels on the same remote host).

The recommended way of making the remote kernel accessible to the local development computer is through an SSH tunnel. This ensures the security of the communication between the systems and prevents exposing ports in a less restricted fashion. While a much deeper discussion around SSH tunnels would be beneficial for those not familiar with them, for brevity here the following command boils it down:

-i ~/.ssh/cloud_keyspecifies the SSH access key to grant secure acces to the remote system,

-L 127.0.0.1:5010:127.0.0.1:5010directs the SSH connection to create a tunnel between port 5010 on the local machine and port 5010 on the remote machine. Once this is established communication on the local port 5010 will be forwarded to the remote host,

remote-user@remote-host-name.comspecifies the user name and host name of the remote computer where the kernel is running.

The port forwarding will remain active for as long as you remained logged ino the remote host in the terminal in which you executed this command. When that terminal is stopped, the remote connection will be as well. Usually, this connection is established first and then the remote kernel command from above is executed on the remote computer to start the remote kernel.

Now that the remote kernel is running and you have an SSH tunnel to the remote host, it is time to start the UI locally. This can be done with either a UI container running on the local host or by using a local Python environment in which Cauldron is installed. For the local UI container option, see information in theUI Containersdocumentation page. In this case we'll use a local Python environment and start the UI with the command: