2021 Q1 Hyperledger Fabric

Owned by David Enyeart
Last updated: Feb 18, 2021 by Danno Ferrin
3 min read


Project

Hyperledger Fabric https://github.com/hyperledger/fabric

Project Health

Hyperledger Fabric continues to mature, as evidenced by the following observations throughout this report:

  • Two LTS releases available
  • Project developers have been spending a larger percentage of time on maintenance and support than in the past, given the increasing number of production deployments and two LTS releases.
  • Lower commit velocity on new features.
  • Healthy RFC process with reviews in contributor meetings to drive consensus on new features.

The commit rate and mailing list activity were down compared to the same period last year. PRs and mailing list questions are generally turned around quickly.

The project would benefit from increased maintainer diversity.

Questions/Issues for the TSC

None.

Releases

v1.4 and v2.2 are the current LTS releases. Each has patch releases quarterly. v1.4 LTS release is scheduled for end of support in April 2021. Production users are encouraged to upgrade to v2.2 as soon as possible.

Releases this quarter:

  • v1.4.10 - January 27, 2021
  • v2.2.2 - January 27, 2021
  • v2.3.0 - November 18, 2020

v2.3.0 added two major features:

  • Ledger snapshot enables a peer to take a snapshot of its state. This allows new peers to join a channel from an agreed upon snapshot, reducing the time to join a channel and the storage size required to maintain a ledger. In the future it will also be possible to prune/archive old blocks to bring the same benefit to existing peers.
  • The channel participation management feature improves the privacy and scalability of the ordering service since a global 'system channel' will no longer be needed for the creation and management of channels.

Overall Activity in the Past Quarter

The project was busy maintaining the two LTS releases and releasing a new minor release.

In addition to the releases, the project completed an overhaul of the documentation deployment guides, tutorials, and related samples in 2020.

Additionally the project has been planning future work through the RFC process.

RFCs merged this quarter:

RFCs in review this quarter:

  • WASM for smart contracts
  • Fabric private chaincode (SGX)
  • BFT ordering service
  • Modular crypto service
  • OpenTelemetry

In active development:

  • Fabric Gateway

Current Plans

The largest item being worked in 2021 is the Fabric Gateway, a new component that will implement much of the high-level 'gateway' programming model. This will remove much of the transaction submission and query logic from the client application and shift it to a common gateway (likely running within a client's peer), enabling each of the various client SDKs to be slimmer, more consistent, and require less maintenance. It will also simplify the administrative overhead of running a Fabric network because client applications will be able to connect and submit transactions via a single network port rather than the current situation where ports have to be opened to multiple peers across potentially multiple organizations.

Maintainer Diversity

No maintainer changes for core Fabric project (11 of 13 from IBM).

Contributor Diversity

Year to year comparison, by commit:

  • Q4 2019 - 1030 commits. 77% from IBM.
  • Q4 2020 - 579 commits. 78% from IBM

Year to year comparison, by contributor:

  • Q4 2019 - 90 contributors. 52% from IBM.
  • Q4 2020 - 79 contributors. 40% from IBM.

Documentation translation was a driver in the increased contributor diversity.

Additional Information

Link to the Fabric dashboard: last quarter

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