OpsSC: Decentralized Blockchain Network Operation Workflow for Hyperledger Fabric

Abstract

Enterprises have paid attention to permissioned blockchains like Hyperledger Fabric, which is one of the most promising platforms, for efficient decentralized transactions without depending on any particular organization. A permissioned blockchain-based system will be typically built across multiple organizations. In such blockchain-based systems, system operations across multiple organizations in a decentralized manner are essential to maintain the value of introducing permissioned blockchains. Decentralized system operations have recently been becoming realistic with the evolution of permissioned blockchains. For instance, the release of Hyperledger Fabric v2.x, in which individual operational tasks for a blockchain network, such as command execution of configuration change of channels (Fabric's sub-networks) and upgrade of chaincodes (Fabric's smart contracts), can be partially executed in a decentralized manner. However, the operational workflows also include the preceding procedure of pre-sharing, coordination, and pre-agreeing the operational information (e.g., configuration parameters) among organizations, after which operation executions can be conducted, and this preceding procedure relies on costly manual tasks. To achieve efficient decentralized operations, we have developed a decentralized inter-organizational operations method that we call Operations Smart Contract (OpsSC), which defines an operational workflow as a smart contract. Our prior research proposed the concept and was focused mainly on a simple framework of OpsSC to execute a sequence of commands and prototyping with Hyperledger Fabric v1.x to validate the concept, and its applicability to the aforementioned underlying blockchain network-level operational workflows (e.g., update of channels and chaincodes) with v2.x has not sufficiently been explored yet. In this paper, we redesign and implement OpsSC for blockchain network operations with Hyperledger Fabric v2.x. This paper presents OpsSC for operating channels and chaincodes, which are essential for managing the blockchain networks, through clarifying detailed workflows of those operations. A cost evaluation based on an estimation model shows that the total operational cost for executing a typical operational scenario to add an organization to a blockchain network having ten organizations could be reduced by 54 percent compared with a conventional script-based method. The implementation of OpsSC has been open-sourced and registered as one of Hyperledger Labs projects, which hosts experimental projects approved by Hyperledger.