Lab Name

Hyperledger Fabric Operator

Short Description

fabric-operator is an open-source, cloud-native Kubernetes operator for administering Hyperledger Fabric networks. The operator follows the CNCF Operator Pattern, delegating the minutiae of performing repetitive, detailed configuration tasks to automated activities performed under the guidance of software-based controllers.

Scope of Lab

fabric-operator addresses several major impediments hindering the general acceptance of Hyperledger Fabric as a platform for building enterprise-scale, permissioned blockchains solutions:

  • As a distributed system, Fabric is by nature an inherently complicated platform. While the core platform has evolved to address technical requirements for implementing a cryptographically secure distributed ledger, little or no consensus has been achieved for the operational management of the platform. As a result, the landscape of management, deployment, and administrative techniques has been severely fragmented into several “siloes”. (As an example, by a recent count we have identified 6 + 27 + 2 separate Fabric Operations Labs spanning the space of open-source, community efforts to bring order to the chaos of Fabric administration.)

  • While early adopters of technology are amenable to accept some form of operational risk, enterprise consumers of Fabric are hindered by both the disparity of administrative approach and access to a marketplace of technical contributors with expertise in Fabric administration. Fabric operator provides a venue for the community to both coalesce on shared / best practices for Fabric administration, and achieve a level of predictability for operational support as realized by an open-source, production-grade, community operator.

  • Fabric application development has traditionally occurred in a vacuum, with individual software / smart contract / application coding occurring in a completely orthogonal Fabric test network (based on Docker Compose), rather than aligning with the ultimate production environment. In addition to naturally aligning with modern “git-ops,” continuous integration, and continuous delivery based models for change management, the operator enables a local development workflow (e.g. run on kubernetes, but on your laptop…) in complete harmony with production deployments on private, hybrid, and public clouds.

  • In simple terms: working with Fabric is hard. The use of a production grade operator will reduce the learning curve for newcomers, accelerate application development / solution delivery time, and greatly reduce the mental complexity necessary to successfully deliver solutions.

In functional terms, fabric-operator provides configuration and flexible automation options for manipulating Fabric networks with:

fabric-operator is an open-source, production-grade, community contribution from IBM. The work spans several (hundreds of?) thousands of hours of hard work, ingenuity, passion, and dedication from the team. Special thanks are in order for key contributors:

Initial Committers

Sponsors

Stewards

Pre-existing repository

  • https://github.com/IBM-Blockchain/fabric-operator