Hands-On Smart Contract Development with Hyperledger Fabric V2

Chapter 3. Hyperledger Fabric Architecture and Components

In the previous chapter, we surveyed four generations of blockchain technology, followed by the Hyperledger architecture and its components. We also introduced you to the Hyperledger ecosystem by reviewing its projects, tools, and libraries. This chapter looks deeper into the Hyperledger family by focusing on the Hyperledger Fabric project. Along the way, we will introduce you to all the Hyperledger Fabric components, including peers, channels, and chaincodes, for both building blockchain applications and understanding concepts covered in the rest of the chapters.

This chapter will help you understand the following:

• Major highlights of Fabric versus other blockchain development platforms

• The role of membership service providers, CAs, and identities in a Fabric permissioned network

• The role of the ledger in Fabric

• Main components of the Fabric network

• The roles that a peer plays in a Fabric network

• The mechanisms through which peers process transactions

• The role of private data and data collection in a Fabric permissioned network

Hyperledger Fabric Overview

Hyperledger Fabric started as a codebase project, combining previous work by Digital Asset Holdings (now called Digital Asset), Blockstream’s Libconsensus library, and IBM’s Open Blockchain platform. Fabric offers a unique elastic and extensible architecture, which performs over and above alternative blockchain platforms. Fabric works very well with other Hyperledger ...