Blockchain for Enterprises — Hyperledger
Blockchain for Enterprises — Hyperledger
As Enterprises around the world look to see how they can apply Blockchain scenarios to their industry, there is always a discussion about what’s the best framework out there which meets the needs of the large Enterprises in terms of security, scalability, modularity, scalability and analytics. Over time, I learnt that this is a religious battle and there is no one right answer there but based on my research and discussion with several industry colleagues and large enterprises, Hyperledger’s frameworks seem to be best bet for enterprise blockchain use cases. In fact, Hyperledger Fabric supports distributed ledger solutions on permissioned networks for a wide range of industries.
So, what is Hyperledger? Hyperledger is open source framework from The Linux Foundation (https://www.hyperledger.org/) supported by more than 235 organisations that contribute code to the frameworks to make them better. It also more than a 60,000+ strong developer community across 35+ countries.
Let us tackle each of this areas in details:
Security:
Enterprises want something which is private and permissioned. The majority of large enterprises have their data architecture and processes defined and well contained. They are most jittery when they hear some of the lapses that have plagued public blockchain networks. Hyperledger Fabric is a framework for Private Permissioned networks, where all participants have known identities and they can only access and contribute to the part of the data that they should have access to in a business process. With this capability, Hyperledger Fabric provides a permissioned network this suits B2B and B2B2C scenarios very well where you are working with your extended community of suppliers and trading partners and end customers in a private rule defined environment. The hash that protects the data could even further enhance the security with a digital key. Hyperledger Fabric provides modified and unmodified PKCS11 for key generation which supports cases like identity management that support more protection for sensitive data. With Channels (part of Hyperledger Fabric) you could ensure atomic level of partitioning of the data on blockchain providing fine grain security access control which other frameworks struggles to provide. In other words, one can implement a “Need to know basis” paradigm very effectively in Hyperledger Fabric.
Modularity:
Hyperledger Fabric offers a plug and play environment allowing network leads to add their components or preferred implementations. A company may want to bring their own components or fragments that they want to re-use and Fabric allows them to fit those in the overall architecture seamlessly. It’s like a Jigsaw puzzle and you can bring you part and complete the overall puzzle and extend. For example, in the areas of consensus, encryptions and others you can extend the Fabric with your own components much more easily.
Scalability:
There are three key layers in Hyperledger Fabric’s Architecture:
1.Distributed logic processing and agreement (“Chain code”)
2.Transaction Order
3.Transaction Validation and Commitment
Because of the way Hyperledger Fabric is architected these three layers provide inherent advantages in scalability. There are fewer cycles of trust and verification required across the network nodes. For example, only signatures and read/write set are being sent around the network improving scalability and optimization in performance. Scaling up usually falls into two areas a) scaling a single peer b) scale the network. Hyperledger Fabric supports both types of scaling much more efficiently.
Analytics:
One of the key requirements of enterprises is how do I link this up to provide end-to-end analytics for the blockchain network. Given support of LevelDB and CouchDB, it adds full data-rich queries support and content is JSON and fully queryable. No changes are required to model chain-code data as JSON as data model is in congruence with the existing key/value model.
This hugely simplifies the analytics need around blockchain enterprise projects and this can easily work with any of the existing analytics leading tool out there and provide much needed visualization and analytical support to bring life in a blockchain enterprise project.
DLT.sg is Hyperledger general member of Hyperledger and we are included in the Blockchain Showcase. Our development team is active contributor to Hyperledger Framework’s.
It was fascinating to meet up with Daniela Barbosa (VP of World Wide Alliances, Hyperledger) during our recent visit to SFO and get the latest in terms of Hyperledger’s Frameworks, community and exchange views with her in terms of the future of Hyperledger. Kudos to the entire Hyperledger team to provide an excellent open source framework for this transformative technology.
As I sign off, I am proud to share on behalf of Hyperledger Singapore community that we have a grand Hyperledger kick-off event on June 29th with Julian Gordon (VP Hyperledger, Asia Pacific) who will be in Singapore for this grand kick-off community event. For those who are keen to contribute and join this fastest growing blockchain developer community please sign up
DLT and Hyperledger is organizing a meetup in Singapore on 29th June 2018. RSVP at the following link.
This meet up is organised to network and discuss few of the important topics for interest among practicing teams. Few of the discussion framework as outlined in my article.
I look forward to share our further experiences with Hyperledger, as we get more and more customers in production and learn from the real-life enterprise deployments.
