2021 Q2 Hyperledger Fabric

Last updated: Apr 29, 2021 by Angelo de Caro

3 min read

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.

Required Information

Have you switched from master to main in all your repos? Yes
Have you implemented repolinter.json in all your repos? I believe the decision was to point to a repolinter.json outside the repo, is there finalized guidance?

Questions/Issues for the TSC

Is there finalized guidance for pointing to an external repolinter.json in CI?

Releases

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

Releases this quarter:

v1.4.10 - January 27, 2021
v1.4.11 - March 2, 2021
v2.2.2 - January 27, 2021
v2.3.1 - February 3, 2021

Upcoming releases planned for April 2021:

v1.4.12
v2.2.3
v2.3.2
v2.4.0-alpha

v2.3 added two major features which are seeing encouraging adoption in the community:

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 preparing for a v2.4.0-alpha release with the new Fabric Gateway (details below).

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

RFCs merged this quarter:

Fabric private chaincode (SGX) - an existing Hyperledger lab that could now be turned into a Fabric subproject given the merged RFC.

RFCs in review this quarter:

WASM for smart contracts
BFT ordering service
Modular crypto service
OpenTelemetry
Orderer ledger snapshots

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 running within the Fabric 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 from a client application to multiple peers across potentially multiple organizations.

Maintainer Diversity

One maintainer retired this quarter. 8 of 12 maintainers are from IBM (two maintainers shifted from IBM to other companies this quarter).

Contributor Diversity

Year to year comparison, by commit:

Q1 2020 - 1100 commits. 77% from IBM.
Q1 2021 - 692 commits. 76% from IBM

Year to year comparison, by contributor:

Q1 2020 - 88 contributors. 53% from IBM.
Q1 2021 - 70 contributors. 40% from IBM.

Documentation translation was a driver in the increased contributor diversity.

Additional Information

Link to the Fabric dashboard: Q1 2021

Technical Oversight Committee