External Chaincode Service in Hyperledger Fabric

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External Chaincode Service in Hyperledger Fabric
blockchainexpert.uk
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• INTRODUCTION

Hyperledger Fabric is the most prominent
enterprise-level blockchain under the Hyperledger
umbrella. At the end of the first month of this
year, Hyperledger has forwarded its second major
release, v2.0. This stable version comes out
after an incubation period of almost 1 year in
alpha and beta stages. The Hyperledger Fabric
comes with many groundbreaking changes from its
previous version v1.4. One of them is its
ability to run chaincode as an external service.
Lets have a look at this. As with all software
solutions, the maintenance of the chaincode is a
headache in hyperledger fabric too. Being in a
distributed environment, this is a real issue.
The code is required to be installed a number of
peers in most cases. But in the new version, we
can deploy and run the chaincode independently
outside the Fabric system. This opens up further
possibilities like deploying the code in
Kubernetes pod. This is enabled by utilizing
another feature of v2.0. That is the external
builder and launcher functionality. Using this
technology we can build and launch the chaincode
with any technology. Both these technologies
together provide a better solution in chaincode
management.
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• Even if the fabric allows us to write chaincode
  in three different programming languages(Go,
  Node.js, Java), this model of chaincode
  management is only supported by Go chaincode
  shim, as of now. We can expect the support of
  other languages and it may also be released in
  the near future.
• The Go shim API now comes with a ChaincodeServer
  type for creating a chaincode server. The
  chaincode id, server endpoint address, TLS
  information, etc are passed into this. This can
  be then executed in a peer machine or in cloud
  services like Kubernetes.
• Before this update, the chaincode source files of
  a particular language, say Node.js is built into
  a chaincode binary. This constitutes the
  chaincode package. But in the case of the new
  model, the package need not constitute the
  chaincode binary, as chaincode is run as an
  external service. Therefore the package consists
  of the endpoint information of chaincode servers
  which runs either in an external server or in a
  cloud Kubernetes based deployments. Another thing
  in the chaincode package is the TLS certificate
  information.
• This is just an introduction about what external
  chaincode service is. Expect more blogs about the
  actual implementation.

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Read more External Chaincode Service in
Hyperledger Fabric
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