Book Image

Hands-On Blockchain with Hyperledger

By : Nitin Gaur, Luc Desrosiers, Venkatraman Ramakrishna, Petr Novotny, Salman A. Baset, Anthony O'Dowd
Book Image

Hands-On Blockchain with Hyperledger

By: Nitin Gaur, Luc Desrosiers, Venkatraman Ramakrishna, Petr Novotny, Salman A. Baset, Anthony O'Dowd

Overview of this book

Blockchain and Hyperledger technologies are hot topics today. Hyperledger Fabric and Hyperledger Composer are open source projects that help organizations create private, permissioned blockchain networks. These find application in finance, banking, supply chain, and IoT among several other sectors. This book will be an easy reference to explore and build blockchain networks using Hyperledger technologies. The book starts by outlining the evolution of blockchain, including an overview of relevant blockchain technologies. You will learn how to configure Hyperledger Fabric and become familiar with its architectural components. Using these components, you will learn to build private blockchain networks, along with the applications that connect to them. Starting from principles first, you’ll learn to design and launch a network, implement smart contracts in chaincode and much more. By the end of this book, you will be able to build and deploy your own decentralized applications, handling the key pain points encountered in the blockchain life cycle.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Packt Upsell
Foreword
Contributors
Preface
Index

Business considerations for choosing a blockchain framework


Numerous criteria come into play when organizations are evaluating whether to adopt blockchain to address their pain points. Here are some considerations from a business perspective:

  • Open platform and open governance: The technology standards a business chooses will set the stage for enterprise blockchain adoption, compliance, governance, and the overall cost of the solution.
  • Economic viability of the solution: Whatever blockchain framework an organizations chooses should provide cost alignment to its existing business models, charge backs, compute equity, and account management. This flows into ROI.
  • Longevity of the solution: As organizations aspire to build a trusted network, they'll want to ensure that they can sustain the cost and operation of the network so that it can grow and scale to accommodate additional participants and transactions.
  • Regulatory compliance: Compliance issues are closely tied to transaction processing and can include events such as industry-specific reporting and analysis for business workflows and tasks, both automated and human-centric.
  • Coexistence with adjacent systems: A blockchain network needs to be able to coexist with the rest of the enterprise, network participants, and adjacent systems, which may have overlapping and complementary functions.
  • Predictable costs of business growth: Business growth depends upon predictable metrics. Historically, a lot of industries have focused on transactions per second, but that measurement differs from system to system based on system design, compute costs, and business processes.
  • Access to skills and talent: The availability of talent affects costs as well as maintenance and the longevity of a blockchain solution as the industry and technology evolve with continued innovation.
  • Financial viability of technology vendors: When choosing vendors, it's vital to think about their viability when it comes to long-term support and the longevity of your blockchain solution. You should examine the long-term vision and the sustainability of the vendor or the business partner's business model.
  • Global footprint and support: Blockchain solutions tend to involve business networks with a global reach and the related skills to support the network's expansion with minimal disruption.
  • Reliance on technology and industry-specific standards: Standards are critical, not only in helping to standardize a shared technology stack and deployment, but also in establishing an effective communication platform for industry experts to use for problem solving. Standards make low-cost, easy-to-consume technology possible.

Blockchain vendors offer various specializations, including:

  • Variant trust systems: Consensus, mining, proof of work, and so on.
  • Lock-in to a single trust system
  • Infrastructure components that are purpose-built for particular use cases
  • Field-tested design through proof of concept

The technological risk of a vendor not adhering to reference architecture based on standardized technology set is a fragmented blockchain model for the enterprise.

From a business point of view, an open standards-based approach to blockchain offers flexibility, along with a pluggable and modular trust system, and therefore is the most ideal option. This approach keeps an enterprise open to specialized blockchains such as Ripple, provides a provisioning layer for the trust system, and offers a separate business domain with the technology to support it.