2019 Q4 Hyperledger Iroha

Created by Sara Garifullina, last modified by Nathan George on Mar 31, 2020

Project Health

During the last quarter we managed to release new version and a patch that made the project more stable as well as added some new features to Iroha. Internships this year were great – both HL and interns from Innopolis University – all of their projects were successful to different extent. Community is relatively active, new projects use Iroha. Overall, everything is well, with no drastic highs or lows. 

Questions/Issues for the TSC

1) We would really like to revive the discussion we started some time ago with  David Huseby and  Ry Jones about wh”at help we could gather with resources for a huge Iroha testing on 100 nodes. There was an option of creating a simulation or getting the infrastructure from CNCF, because the more interest the project gets, the more questions we receive on the performance – it is really important on this stage of project development to have good data on the performance. 

2) Hoping that Ry was able to track down who is in charge of the HL’s  Transifex :  https://www.transifex.com/hyperledger/public/  – we cannot continue using the service that we have now (it is impossible to decently automate it). There is also an option of using one of the open-source localisation tools if HL could provide the infrastructure – all projects could benefit from that ( Sara Garifullina  has some ideas of what could be used). 

3) Another question was the security audit . It was agreed with  David Huseby that we will have it after we integrate Ursa into Iroha  – but there appears to be a misunderstanding about it to be a cause for the next major release. Integration of Ursa did not require that (and so the checklist th”at includes the audit) but at the same time, we did not have an audit for quite a while now. How can we resolve that? 

Releases

Hyperledger Iroha v1.1  – 24th of July

Release 1.1.1  – 20th of September

Overall Activity in the Past Quarter

Questions are being answered, as well as e-mails. It might be interesting to notice that we’ve been receiving more advanced questions recently that might mean deeper interest in the project. We also restructured documentation (also might have helped with easier questions) and added HL Google Analytics code so we could check the interest.

As for the technical updates: 

In our 1.1 we included new API features such as:  RemovePeer command, GetPeers query, CompareAndSetAccountDetail command as well as the respective permissions

Added Postgres options

Integrated vcpkg for dependencies

Together with interns, integrated HL Ursa, Explorer, Burrow!  

Were accepted and integrated support for OSS-Fuzz

We are also trying to rework the storage (huge refactoring that is taking some time)

Work on new TUI (instead of the outdated CLI) is almost finished!

Current Plans

As mentioned before – we are working on some major refactoring that will allow Iroha to be quicker and even more efficient. As for releases, we are planning on having one very soon – when HL Burrow integration is finalised. It will have all of the new integrations and EVM provided by Burrow. 

Also, we are working on making a pluggable BFT consensus – currently it is in research state. Also, we are hoping to fix CI issues or join HL in the universal CI for all of the projects. 

Hopefully, we’ll have some news on Iroha certification, too. 

Maintainer Diversity

Eugene Kovalev   https://github.com/ekovalev

Artyom Gorbachov  https://github.com/art-gor

Contributor Diversity

Currently, it is Soramitsu + another Japanese company currently starting to work with Iroha

+new individual contributor:  https://github.com/ericcurtin

Additional Information

We went to Moscow Bootcamp and hope to see new faces among our community after it! 

Reviewed by

Comments:

I really appreciate that the report mentions activities for integrating other Hyperledger projects. I would suggest to report also activities, if any, in the opposite direction the one that says: We have this component that can be reused in this and this way  (smile)

Posted by angelo.decaro at Oct 17, 2019 13:14

Great seeing several of the Iroha maintainers / contributors at the Moscow summit. It seemed there was a lot of engagement in your sessions.

Regarding security audit, I believe our policy is to do that ahead of major releases for each project.

Posted by dan.middleton@intel.com at Oct 21, 2019 06:24

Check with Rich Zhao who is leading the effort in China to translate Fabric docs as to ownership of hyperledger transifex.

Posted by ChristopherFerris at Oct 24, 2019 14:14