Deploying a cloud-native STX Mining Bot on Kubernetes with Okteto Cloud

AnnMargaret Tutu
9 min readJan 9, 2021

Overview

I’m a proponent of blockchain-based technologies and enjoy studying new chains and corresponding protocols and mechanisms. Being a software engineer, this often means deploying blockchain testnets (“test [blockchain] networks”) to run decentralized applications (“dApps”). Motivated by the STX to 1 Million Mining Challenge (more on this in a bit), in this post, I’m going to take a look at Hiro (formally “Blockstack”) PBC’s Stacks Blockchain and more specifically the Node.js client app developed by Daemon Technologies — Mining Bot.

In doing so, I’ll also walk through the steps of deploying the app directly on Kubernetes with a platform called Okteto. Okteto is emerging as a de facto solution for developers looking to stage directly on bare-metal Kubernetes clusters (in the cloud). Further, by using the pip package nodeenv, I was able to isolate the application in a virtualenv specifically for Node.js services (something I’ll coin, for the purpose of this post, nested environments).

The upcoming sections detail how to deploy the Node.js Mining Bot as a cloud-native app to a Kubernetes cluster in…

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AnnMargaret Tutu

Research Software Engineer (ML, DL, Blockchain, Android), budding cryptologist, writer and aspiring polymath.