hypernephelist n. [from Greek nepho-, cloud] someone who goes above the clouds.

Getting started with Traefik and Kubernetes using Azure Container Service

Traefik is a modern, dynamic load-balancer that was designed specifically with containers in mind. It is able to react to service deployment events from many different orchestrators, like Docker Swarm, Mesos or Kubernetes, and dynamically reload its configuration to route the traffic to these services.


Azure Container Service: Docker swarm mode + NFS server deployment

This article details how to create a Docker swarm mode cluster using the Azure Container Service engine, alongside a separate Virtual Machine acting as an NFS server, then mount an NFS filesystem from a service running on the swarm.


Adding a data disk to a VM using Packer

Packer is an amazing tool to generate virtual machine images for all your favorite hypervisors, container engines, or cloud platforms. In my case, I have several partners who use Packer to generate images for publishing within the Azure Marketplace.


Compile and deploy an Ethereum smart contract using client-side signatures

In my last post I showed you how to deploy an Ethereum Smart Contract programmatically, using the web3 API. The code I showed works in the case you are working with a local Ethereum node, where you can safely unlock your account. However, if you are using a remote node, which is the case if you are using our Bletchley infrastructure template for example, then unlocking an account on the remote node exposes it to abuse, i.e. while it is unlocked, anyone can submit transactions on that account behalf.


Compile and deploy an Ethereum smart contract with solc and web3

There are quite a few Ethereum development tools and environments out there, but sometimes it is useful to be able to deploy a smart contract programmatically using the simplest and most basic tools. For example, when testing various Ethereum implementations and variations, you might find that your development tool of choice doesn’t interact well and is not able to deploy anything. This post is basically some notes about deploying a smart contract using simple, and hopefully universal, Node.JS code.