Poster: Service discovery for hyperledger fabric

Abstract

Hyperledger Fabric (HLF) is a modular and extensible permissioned blockchain platform released to open-source and hosted by the Linux Foundation. The platform's design exhibits principles required by enterprise grade business applications like supply-chains, nancial transactions, asset management, food safety, and many more. For that end HLF introduces several innovations, two of which are smart contracts in general purpose languages (chaincode in HLF), and exible endorsement policies, which govern whether a transaction is considered valid. Typical blockchain applications are comprised of two tiers: the rst tier focuses on the modelling of the data schema and embedding of business rules into the blockchain by means of smart contracts (chaincode) and endorsment policies; and the second tier uses the SDK (Software Development Kit) provided by HLF to implement client side application logic. However there is a gap between the two tiers that hinders the rapid adoption of changes in the chaincode and endorsement policies within the client SDK. Currently, the chaincode location and endorsement policies are statically congured into the client SDK. This limits the reliability and availability of the client in the event of changes in the platform, and makes the platform more dicult to use. In this work we address and bridge the gap by describing the design and implementation of Service Discovery. Service Discovery provides APIs which allow dynamic discovery of the conguration required for the client SDK to interact with the platform, alleviating the client from the burden of maintaining it. This enables the client to rapidly adapt to changes in the platform, thus signicantly improving the reliability of the application layer. It also makes the HLF platform more consumable, simplifying the job of creating blockchain applications.