The Universal Resolver Infrastructure
A DIF-hosted resource for community development
Introduction
It has been almost three years since DIF began working on the Universal Resolver (GitHub: Universal Resolver) — a foundational piece of infrastructure for the Decentralized Identity ecosystem (see the original announcement). Since then, our vision of being interoperable across ledgers and DID methods has seen a lot of support. Thanks to community contributions, the Universal Resolver now supports around 30 different DID methods.
Today, we are happy to announce an updated set of instances where the Universal Resolver is deployed. One stable and one experimental version will be iterated, maintained, and hosted by DIF as a service to the community!🎉
While this is undoubtedly a useful resource for research, experimentation, testing, and development, it is important that it not be mistaken for a production-grade universal resolver. It should be pointed out that:
- This infrastructure is neither intended or approved for production use cases and that nobody should rely on it for anything other than for development and testing purposes.
- These two specific deployments are not production-ready. The preferred scenario continues to be that all DID-based information systems, run by a method operator or otherwise, production or otherwise, host their own instance of the Universal Resolver (or other DID Resolution tools).
- DIF withholds the right to limit or modify the performance of this free service in case usage for production, commercial, and/or malicious purposes is detected.
Two Deployments
The following two deployments are now available as a community service:
* https://resolver.identity.foundation/ — Hosted on IBM Cloud by DIF (thanks IBM!). While not considered production-ready, this instance is expected to be relatively stable. It will be tested before and after manual updates from time to time, with versioned releases.
* https://dev.uniresolver.io/ — Hosted on AWS by DIF. This instance is more experimental, will be updated frequently, and is connected to CI/CD processes. It may be down from time to time or have unexpected functionality changes.
Note: For backward compatibility, the original URL https://uniresolver.io/ will now redirect to https://dev.uniresolver.io/.
Documentation
See the following links for more information about testing, release, and deployment processes of the Universal Resolver:
- AWS Architecture: https://github.com/decentralized-identity/universal-resolver/blob/master/docs/dev-system.md
- CI/CD Process: https://github.com/decentralized-identity/universal-resolver/blob/master/docs/continuous-integration-and-delivery.md
- Branching Strategy: https://github.com/decentralized-identity/universal-resolver/blob/master/docs/branching-strategy.md
- Release process: https://github.com/decentralized-identity/universal-resolver/blob/master/docs/creating-releases.md
- Periodically, this standing work item is discussed in the Identifiers and Discovery Working Group, so that group’s recorded meetings and discussions on Slack and mailing list may contain further insight on the above topics.
