2019 Q2 Hyperledger Fabric

Created by Christopher Ferris, last modified by Kelly M Olson on Apr 11, 2019

Project

Hyperledger Fabric

Project Health

Fabric continues to grow and mature. Our  v1.4.1-rc1  release candidate was delivered on March 29th (announced 30th). We have experienced a slight increase in the diversity of contributors with IBM comprising 43% of the contributors over the past quarter (-2%).

There are a good mix of questions in chat, email and on  Stackoverflow  – now  3,678  questions (an increase of 228 since January) for the ‘hyperledger-fabric’ tag, with the majority being answered. The questions themselves continue to be increasingly sophisticated, which is also a good sign.

There has also been a good deal of new major contributions being proposed and started. Fabric performance (which for a DLT is actually pretty decent) is receiving lots of interest with various proposals for optimizations that can yield significant performance improvements. Additionally, there’s ongoing work on a new command-line interface and more.

Issues

One issue that has been addressed recently is the aging of Gerrit CRs. Often times, when someone submits a CR, there is no follow-up of review comments, or someone submits a draft CR and lets it linger in the CR backlog. We have addressed much of the older CRs from 2018 and into January of 2019. Work continues to drive down the backlog so that we can introduce the automation.

Releases

As noted, Hyperledger Fabric 1.4.1-rc1 was released on March 29th. This release adds support for a Raft consensus orderer and some additional operational metrics and health monitoring capabilities. The Fabric maintainers expect to publish the final v1.4.1 release next week.

Overall Activity in the Past Quarter

email traffic recovered to typical levels from the dip in the last month of 4Q18, and remains strong. The RocketChat traffic seems to have increased as well, but there are so many channels to track it is hard to get a sense for how much of an increase there’s been.  Stackoverflow  traffic icontinues apace, reaching over  3,678  questions, an increase of over 225 in the last quarter.

Current Plans

With version 1.4 LTS just released, the project is working on 1.4.1 and 2.0.0 releases. The project maintains a  release roadmap , and maintains a  JIRA dashboard  to track specific items.

v2.0.0 is the 2019 target release for more substantial new features, including an enhanced chaincode lifecycle, a raft consensus mechanism (stepping stone to full BFT ordering service), and deeper token support. We expect an alpha drop of v2.0 next week.

We hold playback meetings for design reviews and intend to continue regular maintainer hangouts (see community calendar) every other week to track the release plan’s progress against objectives.

Maintainer Diversity

Maintainer diversity increased because we retired 2 maintainers (IBM and State Street) and one of the IBM maintainers left IBM for another company. We remain confident that there is potential on the horizon.

Contributor Diversity

As previously noted, contributor diversity grew in 1Q 2019. IBM now represents 43% (-2%) of the contributors with some new more substantial contributions being proposed.

Additional Information

n/a

Reviewed by

  • ✅ Arnaud Le Hors
  • ✅ Baohua Yang
  • ✅ Binh Nguyen
  • ✅ Christopher Ferris
  • ✅ Dan Middleton
  • ✅ Hart Montgomery
  • ✅ Kelly Olson
  • ✅ Mark Wagner
  • ✅ Mic Bowman
  • ✅ Nathan George
  • ✅ Silas Davis

Comments:

Glad that the PSWG could review the FastFabric work. I am sure th"at the WG would like to help in some way in improving the performance and scalability of Fabric and all HL projects.

I am also interested in helping with the perf and scale efforts on a contributor level.

Posted by mwagner at Apr 04, 2019 13:58

Will the v2.0 alpha include support for kubernetes out of the box ?

ie. no more docker in docker for chaincode.

Posted by mwagner at Apr 04, 2019 13:59

Any update on Ursa integration or Idemix support?

Posted by nage at Apr 11, 2019 12:06

Mark, the chaincode 2.0 that I initiated to remove chaincode docker dependency hasn't been merged for alpha, but the pull requests are out there if you like to explore. We are hoping to get that in for beta. 

Posted by binhn at Apr 11, 2019 13:45

Idemix support has been in Fabric since 1.2, finshed in 1.3 and 1.4. We have no immediate plans for Ursa.

Posted by ChristopherFerris at Apr 11, 2019 14:00