Hosting Ark Node(s) in Microsoft Azure

with Template Deployment Walk-through

There are plenty of guides out there on how to create Ark Nodes, secure your node, and compilations of these with Ark Stats.

Rather than go through these other tasks one-by-one, which have been detailed by professionals in the links above, I want to put emphasis on WHERE the servers are hosted.

Most guides have you use a cheap DigitalOcean droplet, or some other $5 server. While economical, it’s certainly not meeting minimum Ark requirements at that point. By shifting to the use of Azure, you can make the VMs Highly Available, Scalable, and easily replicate-able via templates from the web-portal. There are also PowerShell automation capabilities by using this platform.

We will do the following:

Create an Azure Portal / Resource Manager logon

Deploy our first virtual machine

— Create a new “Resource Group”

— Configure the Azure Firewall (“Network Security Group”)

Use the first virtual machine to create a template

Deploy another Ark Node VM via this template, and join to an “Availability Set” with the first VM

Minimum requirements for running an Ark node, per Ark.io documentation:

Operating System: Ubuntu 16.04

CPU: 1 core (More is better)

RAM: 4GB (More is better)

Disk: 20GB — SSD recommended

Some quick Azure breakdown on sizing near these requirements can be found at: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/calculator/