Hyperledger Fabric for Enterprise Application Development

Blockchain is an emerging technology poised to radically transform the operating models of diverse industries. When evaluating blockchain platforms for your business use case development, it is important to consider their various attributes. In this article, we count them down and present Hyperledger Fabric, a blockchain framework for Hyperledger blockchain development. Fabric is one of the open-source blockchain engines maintained under Hyperledger projects for robust and efficient enterprise application development.

Hyperledger | The Greenhouse for Enterprise Blockchain

Although blockchain has significant potential, it is not a one-size-fits-all solution for enterprises. Every enterprise has requirements for distinctive features and customization to enable a blockchain solution to fulfill its intended objective.

Therefore, there is a need for blockchains with different features that provide effective solutions across diverse industries. Hyperledger acts upon this need by providing a greenhouse structure for open-source blockchain development.

Hyperledger serves as a “greenhouse” that brings users, developers, and vendors from diverse industries together. All these participants share a few common interests, they are interested in Hyperledger blockchains like Indy, Burrow, Fabric, and more for enterprise application development.

In this blog, we will explore and assess the advantages of the blockchain framework Hyperledger Fabric for enterprise application development.

Read More | The Potential of Hyperledger Fabric for Enterprise Solutions and Its Use Cases

Hyperledger Fabric | A Blockchain Platform for Enterprise Solutions

Hyperledger Fabric is a blockchain platform intended for building distributed ledger-based enterprise solutions. It offers a modular application architecture that enables high degrees of confidentiality, flexibility, resiliency, and scalability. As a result, solutions developed with Fabric become adaptable for almost any industry.

Enterprise Application Development with Hyperledger Fabric

Hyperledger Fabric is one of the most stable, permissioned, and general-purpose, blockchain platforms for developing enterprise solutions.

Fabric provides the provision for components, like consensus method and membership services, to be plug-and-play. It hosts smart contracts called “chaincode” that comprise the business rules of the system using container technology.

Also, its design supports various pluggable components to accommodate the complexity across the entire economy. The fabric serves as an extensible blockchain framework for deploying enterprise-grade distributed applications. It supports multiple consensus mechanisms and customization to deliver upon different use cases and trust models.

Developers write Hyperledger-based distributed applications in general-purpose programming languages to eliminate the dependency on any native cryptocurrency. This concept contrasts with other blockchains that require coding in a domain-specific language for running smart contracts or using a cryptocurrency.

Fabric, with its architectural approach, enhances the way blockchain platforms deal with non-determinism, resource exhaustion, and performance attacks.

Find out more about Hyperledger Fabric

Now, let’s explore why Hyperledger Fabric can be the best choice to build your enterprise blockchain network.

Permissioned Blockchain Deployment

For enterprise blockchain app development, building a permissioned one is essential.

There are businesses like banks, financial institutions, healthcare providers, and more that operate under stringent regulatory requirements. Also, they cannot allow anyone to view transaction information. As information is an asset to such enterprises, unauthorized viewing can risk future financial profits.

Fabric provides solutions to build a permissioned framework. It enables all participants to have known identities. It validates those identities against an organization's identity management system.

Therefore, there are no anonymous or pseudonymous users in the network.

Organizations can use a ’Membership Service Provider‘ (MSP) provided by Fabric. MSP is for the issuance and validation of certificates and user authentication.

Enterprises using MSP can designate various roles to the nodes in the network, such as:

• Client: for invoking transactions
• Orderer: for updating transaction data
• Peer: for receiving updates from the orderer and committing transactions to the ledger
• Endorser: a type of peer for validating transaction authenticity

The process of developing a permissioned enterprise application with Hyperledger Fabric is complex and challenging. A good idea is to think about hiring expert Hyperledger blockchain developers to ensure that the network runs like clockwork.

Explore | Analyzing the Food Traceability System Developed by Walmart with Hyperledger Fabric

Trustless, Scalable, and Performant

Hyperledger Fabric works on a modular architecture. The architecture enables it to divide transaction processing into three phases.

• Distributed logic processing and agreement (“chaincode”)
• Transaction ordering
• Transaction validation and commitment.

This separation provides advantages like fewer levels of trust and verification requirements across node types, and optimized network scalability and performance.

As only the signatures and read/write set traverse the network, it optimizes the scalability and performance. Besides, as only the endorsers and the committers can access the transaction, fewer levels of trust across different parts of the blockchain system, and thus, strengthen the security.

Need-to-know Basis Access

Businesses determine the need for the secrecy of some components of data. It is due to competition, security laws, and regulations regarding the confidentiality of personal data. Moreover, blockchain data partitioning can help businesses to accomplish it.

Channels, which are supported in Hyperledger Fabric, allow data to go only to those parties that need to know. Essentially, channels provide a data-partitioning capability that selectively enables the visibility of the transaction data.

Also, Read | Developing Education-to-Employment Verification Solution with Hyperledger Fabric

Supported by Business Leaders

Large enterprise firms like IBM, Intel, and Cisco support Hyperledger Fabric development. It will give good stability and confidence to organizations that are unsure of the future of blockchain.

Also, organizations are inclined to build on this platform blockchain applications, as established tech companies heavily influence them.

Modular Architecture Plug-in Components Support

Hyperledger Fabric architecture modularity allows network designers to plug into their preferred component implementations, which is an advantage. One of the most sought-after modularity areas is "bringing your own identity." Some multi-company networks already have identity management and want to reuse rather than rebuild.

Smart Contracts

Similar to other frameworks, Hyperledger Fabric also allows us to build smart contracts called “Chaincode”. The important factor is that chaincode helps to build complex logic which is crucial for industries such as the supply chain as it has complex business logic.

Looking Forward

The above benefits demonstrate that Hyperledger is highly appropriate for using blockchain technology to develop industrial applications. Unlike Bitcoin and Ethereum, hyperledger does not require a built-in cryptocurrency and this signals that Hyperledger is targeting business applications at the enterprise level.

If you want to start a Hyperledger-based solution for your business, then connect with our blockchain developers.