2021 Q2 Hyperledger Indy

Owned by Stephen Curran
Last updated: May 15, 2021 by Arun .S.M.
3 min read

Projects

Distributed Ledger
Client Tool
Shared Components

Project Health

Very little has changed in the overall summary, so the following is essentially the same as the last quarter: Indy is a healthy project, particularly at the deployments and business interest level, but continues to be short on contributors.  Interest has increased maintained in the quarter, with more contributors on the specific initiatives of the team, and a lot more continued participation at the bi-weekly the Contributors meeting. The current work focuses on modernizing the CI/CD process to use GitHub Actions (and eliminate reliance on specific people and infrastructure) for indy-node, indy-plenum and indy-sdk, and upgrading the dependencies for indy-node artifacts to run on Ubuntu 20.04. Coming soon will be a code-focused effort to add support for the new "did:indy" DID Method that will align Indy with the pending W3C DID Core Specification.

Work has proceeded, with releases, on the replacements for Indy SDK – indy-vdr and indy-shared-rs.  Those will lead up to a new capability to run Aries agents (notably at first, Aries Cloud Agent Python agents) run without need for the indy-sdk.

The CI/CD work is very close to completion, and a new Ubuntu 20.04 version of Indy is expected Real Soon Now. The completion of that work will make it much easier to evolve Indy.

Per the Indy Activity Dashboard (2021-01 to 2021-03), there were 121 commits from 20 contributors. which is up slightly from the last quarter.

Questions/Issues for the TSC

Issues from previous reports:

Build Pipelines

Update: The end is in sight on changing the CI/CD pipelines from Jenkins to GitHub Actions for indy-node, indy-plenum and indy-sdk. CD is all that is left. This has been the focus of the community during this period as without this, the ability to release products is extremely limited.

Diversity of Contributor Community

Update: This remains a top of mind issue with the maintainers.  We are considering a "Contributor Campaign" in conjunction with Hyperledger Staff to build attention to both Indy and the new "did:indy" DID Method.

Releases

  • indy-sdk 1.16.0
  • indy-shared-rs 0.2.3
  • indy-vdr 0.2.0

Overall Activity in the Past Quarter

In the past quarter, ledger code development has slowed as we focus on code management – upgrading the Indy Node and Plenum CI/CD pipeline and upgrading Indy Node to run on Ubuntu 20.04.  The main code related activity was done by a team focused on being able to remove ledger plugins from a running instance of Indy.

Work on defining the new Indy DID Method is largely complete, with the key decisions all made.  Left is wrapping up the specification and defining the backlog of work for indy-node, indy-sdk and indy-vdr.

Current Plans

(Note – little changed) The push will to (finally!) complete the new CI/CD Indy Node and Plenum pipelines, and the Ubuntu 20.04 upgrade. In parallel, we'll try to wrap up the "did:indy" DID Method specification and generate a backlog of work to be added to Indy Node, Indy VDR and Indy SDK.  We anticipate that next quarter, with the ability to easily release code, addressing the DID Method backlog will be the focus.  We also expect to see a renewed interest in that work as Indy deployments spin up in both North America (Indicio Network) and Europe (IDUnion).

Maintainer Diversity

(Note – no change) The bi-weekly Indy Contributors call continues to be the medium by which maintainers coordinate work, discuss critical issues to the Indy codebase, and agree on HIPEs. The core maintainers are in close contact, and the new maintainers are gaining experience and confidence with the components.

Contributor Diversity

(Note – no change) We've had several organizations join the Indy Contributors call and some are doing the work on the upcoming release (code changes) and the CI/CD pipeline. Interest in Indy has been rising because of the demand for verifiable credentials related to the various COVID-19 use cases, such as travel and back to work plans.

Additional Information

(Note – no change)

Reviewed by