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+
+1. Introduction
+
+  XOS is comprised of 3 core services:
+  
+  * A database backend (postgres)
+  * A webserver front end (django)
+  * A synchronizer daemon that interacts with the openstack backend.
+
+  We have created separate dockerfiles for each of these services, making it easier to
+  build the services independently and also deploy and run them in isolated environments. 
+
+2. Database Container
+  
+  To build and run the database container:
+  
+  $ cd postgres; make build && make run;
+
+3. XOS container
+  
+  To build and run the xos webserver container:
+
+  $ cd xos; make build && make run;
+
+  You should now be able to access the login page by visiting http://localhost:80 and
+  log in using the default paadmin account. It may be helpful to bootstrap xos with 
+  some sample data; deployment, controllers, sites, slices, etc. You can get started by
+  loading tosca configuration for the opencloud demo dataset:
+
+  $ cd xos; make runtosca;
+
+  Or you can create you own tosca configuraton file and customize the dataset however you
+  want. You can all load your own tosca configuration by setting the TOSCA_CONFIG_PATH 
+  environment variable before executing the make command:
+
+  $ cd xos; TOSCA_CONFIG_PATH=/path/to/tosca/config.yaml make runtosca
+
+4. Synchronizer container
+
+  The syncornonizer shares many of the same dependencies as the xos container. The synchronizer 
+  container takes advantage of this by building itself on top of the xos image. This means
+  you must build the xos image before building the synchronizer image. The XOS and 
+  synchronizer containers can run on separate hosts, but you must build the xos image
+  on the host that you plan to run the synchronizer container. Assuming you have already 
+  built the xos container, executing the following will build and run the synchronizer container:
+
+  $ cd synchronizer; make build && make run
+
+  
+
+