How do I deploy hyperledger fabric/composer in the cloud?

Question

I've finished the Hyperledger Composer tutorial and successfully deployed/run it locally (with composer-rest-server).

Now I want to deploy it (eg. Google Cloud) so that I can show it to external people, but I feel confused about what to do now and haven't been able to find any good tutorial for this "next step".

Since composer is running on fabric, I guess I need to get fabric going - but that consists of many docker containers running. So I presume I should collect all that in a stackfile or similar (right?).

Question: How would you go about moving forward beyond deploying/running hyperledger fabric/composer locally and deploying it somewhere? (I understand that there are many ways of doing this but I would appreciate some general guidance as well as some concrete example)

Answer 1

If you are not concerned with scaling to a more robust deployment, and just want to host a small development environment on your favorite cloud platform, you can provision a VM that is configured similarly to the vagrant devenv that the team developing Fabric used before the availability of native support for Docker on Mac and Windows. Then you can simply use Docker Compose to spin up the fabric-samples/first-network tutorial network. It would be suitable for developing in the cloud.

If you are looking for a framework to deploy to various cloud platforms, you might look into use of the Cello Ansible driver. It has been tested against a few of the cloud providers.

Answer 2

Here is one path. Sign up for an IBM Bluemix account. You get one free cluster to play with. Follow the instructions here

https://ibm-blockchain.github.io/ for a cloud sandbox including the composer rest server.

You end up installing the .bna file using the installed playground.

I used the IBM cloud foundry template to create a simple Node site with a single page hitting the API exposed in the cluster. If you just want to show the blockchain you can just use the explore page that the Rest server exposes or use something like Postman to hit the API.

Note that they do not mention. The command line tools require Python 2.6 so I had to downgrade from 3.

Answer 3

IBM Bluemix offers the following with respect to Blockchain:

• Hyperledger Composer based Solution Architecture here https://hyperledger.github.io/composer/introduction/solution-architecture.html
• Hyperledger Composer Online Playground here https://hyperledger.github.io/composer/installing/getting-started-with-playground.html
• You can deploy to live network using this IBM Blockchain Platform Recipe here https://ibm-blockchain.github.io/platform-deployment/
• Sample Apps
  Marbles App https://github.com/IBM-Blockchain/marbles
  Fabrid Car App https://github.com/hyperledger/fabric-samples/tree/release/fabcar

Do go through the links and try it out.

Hope this helps.