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Our CTO Mohan Venkataraman and SVP Isaac Kunkel spent the past week at the Hyperledger Global Forum in Switzerland. They talked about different reference architectures, technical and business patterns, and consortium building and governance from their experience at Chainyard.
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We’ve provided a transcript below!
We’ve seen all of these things coming together in projects that we've been working on over the last three years and so this is pretty much a survey of what we've learned what we've done and what we've coalesced into into these slides today. A little bit about Chainyard as I said we're based in North Carolina, we're about 50 people now 80 percent in North Carolina 20 percent. In Hyderabad India we have deep expertise and blockchain specifically we’ve been working with fabrics since its inception. We were fortunate enough to partner with IBM in the early days of the beginning of the hyper laser project and we came into the labs with them to help them to start with building their their CI CD pipeline to put out the quarterly releases. Obviously it took a while to get the quarterly releases that started last year happy to say that 1.4 was released today.
We do focus on permission blockchains, we often get asked about crypto ideas we tend to give to people's our opinions and thoughts on that but the projects we've done over the last three has evolved in based on permission blockchains we specifically focus on the value that we believe blockchain will bring to enterprises as we continue to move forward all right um we have done some work in the theory 'm as well much of that has been in the government sector and we've studied quorum and corta alongside those we think all of those will tend to dominate going forward and that's why we you know we've put some effort into all of those we've worked on a variety of platforms and in industries but the ones that we focus on and and invest in our supply chains.
You’ve seen an awful lot of those use cases over the last two days in manufacturing and transportation specifically is where we focused we are hyperledger members and active contributors we also are members of data which is blockchain in Transport Alliance which has over 400 members so in the transportation industry we're seeing a lot of traction as well an interest in blockchain and we understand that much of that's because of the tremendous potential under supply chains and we have expertise in consortium building and setting up governance and you'll see some of that in the reference architectures today and the reason we can say we have expertise in that is we've worked on three projects that are have moved to product status.
They’re all in their early stages of beta but a lot of the work that we've done over the last two years has been working on building this consortiums talking to people inviting them in finding the value for all the stakeholders and then putting governance models in place I'm happy to say that within the next quarter you'll hear a product that we're launching in the supply chain space called Trust Your Supplier and we've you know the last year has been tremendous amount of nothing but the the governance side the consortium billing side the original prototype was done over a year ago so as I know that we have a lot to go through Mohan is going to go through most of it at the end I will come back to the business patterns I do want to say these slides should be available for download if they're not we're happy to share them with you and you can ask questions at the end we hope to have a few minutes for that or you can see us afterwards I got it
So good evening everyone I'm really very happy to be here to see such a big crowd it is a little bit intimidating for me but let's fight let's see how I can do a good job here so what we have done is like project after project we learned the hard way as Isaac said you know I have 14 you know consultants in IBM blockchain labs all they do is test the fabric before it goes into the community and along with that we learned a lot of stuff like the first project we started without a participant in the network for a customer and it turned out to be very difficult for us to take it to production because new members would refuse to join because they thought the first member it's all very proprietary to the first member so we learned that in the next project we learned that we have to have at least two members in the consortium before the project really can take off successfully and that's a pattern we continued and as Isaac says you know like a lot of this is based on our learnings we can quickly put together solutions for our customers and I'm sharing our knowledge with you all and and I hope it is beneficial the methodology or the approach that we follow may apply to you it may not apply to you as well or it may be a modified approach that suits you.
So one of the first things that we said when we set out to build solutions and whatever we built today is we said we applied a set of core principles we said like we will build only on fabric so that's all chosen platform if not if the customers choice is Etherium we will do that the second is we do want to utilize Identity and Access Management it is easy to read I'm just gonna skim through this but we set up a set of what do you call core principles into any application that we are going to design in whether it's Etherium or whether it is fabric so we laid this out but most of the experience from Etherium has been distilled into the fabric space
so that's so if I move on to the next one I have 45 slides I want to see how I can pace it nicely so the first thing is like what we did is like whatever we learnt we we learned that in order to enable a customer we have to follow a very orderly pattern of analyzing the business case of identifying the opportunity and then from that point onwards how do I take that opportunity to a strategy and an implementation so we started with the blocks in reference model and so it helped us a lot and then we figured that when our product is going into production the consortium became the biggest issue meaning like customer you know that the contractual agreements with the legal lawyers on both sides and then finer details of what we should do and what we should not do who owns the court so we went into governance and we said these are the steps we need to do in order to establish governance but then when we were doing governance one of the parties said like have you done code scanning security scanning how are we sure that the network that you have built is actually secure so we said okay let's hire an outside company to do a security analysis of our solution and there came a security deployment model and then from that point onwards it's like it's not blockchain alone there are many participants in this network whether it is SAP, Arriba they are all part of the ecosystem of a solution so we need to know end-to-end system architecture and when we got all this together. I had to train our analyst what they do so we we said this is an analysis reference model that the analysts can go and work with our customers so let's warn to the very first one.
You know this is the simplest representation of a reference of a reference model it looks at the business the user the blockchain and the application and other services that need to be in the ecosystem and what it help does is it provides us a logical path to decompose the entire entire customer issue into very easy to understand what pieces do we need to actually analyze and develop and code so we understood fabric where you and then we learned that your organizations organizations should have peers so we laid this this is a very high-level piece and the next slide is going to be a little intense
Let’s see what it says okay so this is our reference model okay when we go to a customer okay what you can see is on the top you see that we have to do the business analysis thoroughly like you have to have a business model we learned that you can't go with the technology and then later on try to figure the business model we made that mistake in one of the projects and then later on trying to justify what the business model is so you had to work through the business model the current and target process the business transformation where you are versus where you want to go along with your ecosystem business participants you had to work through and then you have to download the business case because one of the you know one of the problems we have seen as if we don't define the business case very clearly there is a tendency to do what we build today into a blockchain solution and it becomes like a transactional system like anything else that we have screwed up in the past so we have to know what the opportunities and from there the business architecture and then take on how do I design and deliver this right so that's very first in our in our model our business analyst work through a design thinking process with the customer with all the stakeholders and then we lay this out once it is done you know the next step in us is to find who the users of the system are now there's a composer model which says you need to know the participants but what we noticed is there are business participants which are organizations for example in some of a Cisco metalife chevron they're all members of a particular network we potentially will build but then we have to understand who those participants are and then whether they want to really be part of the network as a as a node operating user or an extra so we have to understand who the participants are we then focus on technical participants you know so in some of the solutions that we built a node operator need not necessarily be an organization you know what we noticed is that we could have a technical node which can do things like management or analytics or anything else you know even key management so because those are not owned by any specific organization but they are part of the network so the solution as we expanded and we talked to many architects we found that there are peers some of the some of the organizations and their peers our business participants and some of them are technical participants in the same network and then we looked at other users you know there are you know system and human users so there are users who are systems there are human users and then there are passive users are external like in the solution we build there could be an auditor who has nothing to do with the blockchain but is an adviser and sometimes uses the application and so they need credentials so are there you know active users versus passive users who are they you know internal and external human then governance members so there could be governance members in the network we build they have nothing to do with the blockchain but they may be investors they may have voting powers so that other members who need credentials on the network then go on into roles and responsibilities for each one and what is their access control mechanisms and the next one we I'm dwelling a little bit longer on this but then the rest of it I will move a little faster but you know on the blockchain side you know we have to look at all the assets that we do you know the model technically what transactions are we dealing with what kind of events the system has to generate then information management right what is the information model you know like what is the data that I'm gonna store on the chain what are the data that I'm going to store off chain what is the data that has to be private
etc etc like what is confidential so that whole analysis then we look at all the contracts that we need to build the contract templates so we learned that in Etherium I could have contract templates and I could dynamically fire a contract at runtime so we said like let's see how to do that so you know reference model we have contract templates and we use that then business rules you have to know all the business rules that need to be implemented on the contract or off contract and then you go down you know what are the policies policies are universally applicable like passwords are to be changed every as so often our credentials are to be changed every so often so what policies are there and then in the network look at audit and compliance so many of the projects we have done they involve audit and compliance show me your transaction history show me what kind of audits have you implemented can you prove to me so and so so are there any audit and compliance requirements then look at Oracle's and integration so there are solutions in which we actually communicate with external Oracle's which might be things like you know exchange rates or that could be integrations like si P Arriba Salesforce some of which we have done so what kind of integrations are required so an enterprise solution is not just a blockchain self-contained you have to talk to a bigger ecosystem then tokenization in one of the solutions we are doing actually it's a hyper ledger project but we learned how to organization works with ERC 20 and so on and so forth so in the solution you know tys trust your supplier we actually issue credits of you know credits in the form of ERC 20 tokens that we implemented on top of hyper ledger so that we can issue credits to verifiers and others and that's so we learned that organization has to be analyzed properly what kind of tokens are they are the asset tokens utility tokens crypto tokens and then last but not least documents what documents do I need to save as part of my architecture you know if that is an invoice do I need a copy of the invoice toward externally a hash of that document physical document on the chain so this is like a complete analysis of what all I need to do in order to build a full solution and
Finally you is you know in every application everybody loves our UI if they don't know what is happening behind the scene and so we increasingly noted that UI UX expertise is essential for all the apps that we have developed so there's a presentation layer and then there's mobile Ouya you know mobile UI and then there is the application components because an application talks to the blockchain but it also talks to other pieces so if you take this this is the core of our reference in order to build anything we need to do this level of analysis at the bottom you can see a lot of other pieces like you know what is the pieces in the block that I need to have then there is you know what kind of API services and integrations I have to provide these are platform services like if I do AWS we are licensing AWS services like key management and so on and so forth so what are the things on the platform that I really need to license some of it is self-explanatory but we spent a lot of time looking at what is what HSM technologies are available because the customer is very cost-conscious so we did a lot of evaluations so we realized that in our platform we need to consider what kind of HSM and key management services that we need to utilize you can move on to the other areas you can see what is my off chain storage technology going to be what is my document storage technology going to be what is my application and analytics engine because the solution we develop has got an integration into an analytics engine so whether we use Watson or whether I use tensorflow what does a customer prefer and then on the right block in the complete side
we actually built reusable components because every project I have login I have session management I have crypto encryption decryption so this whole set we built pre-built components so that when I go to a customer some of these things I don't have to keep reinventing so we focus on the business aspects and then we use our pre-built components and then we figure out platform services what do we need and then at the bottom most layer is some of our solutions are implemented on IBP some of them are in Azure and some of them are on AWS so we look at the platform services based on the customer so this is like kind of our starting reference model for blockchain solutions and that's what we use when we go to a customer on the right side you can see other things like you know what kind of tools we will use what is our you know development environment going to be what kind of you know system management tools so on and so so with this you know what I'm gonna do is
I'm gonna shift to the next one which is like we learned that we had to build a consortium and you know we started off early trying to figure out what is consortium building mean you know so and realize that when our foot when our first product is going out we got to work with a variety of lawyers and everything is like a homeowner's association if you work if you live in the United States my neighborhood has a homeowner's association there are bylaws there are rules and I have to behave according to the rules that the homeowners association has put together they treat all of us as consortium members right so we use the same principles and we noted that first thing in building consortiums is you have to have your bylaws or articles of engagement between all your participants
so there are investors who want to invest in your solution and then there are consortium members who actually want to be a member of your consortium so at the top we have like governance processes governance structure financial model and incentive model is the high level components at the bottom we have technical components so right now we are negotiating what is the service level agreements how you know what is your disaster recovery how are you going to support me if there is a bug what is your ticketing system these are the issues that are common in traditional applications we are facing that with our own product and even with the solutions that we have supported so we came up with let's see what are the different pieces that we need to do right so we looked at it's a governance process you know I need to have workflow you know so suppose a new member wants to join the consortium and the existing members have a process right fill up this form you get you know you know we have to verify the credentials of the new member who wants to join the consortium bead and organization we then how to issue them credentials we have to issue them you know like you know how do we enroll them you know how do we activate them on the network so on and so forth
so there's this whole membership model then there's governance structure you know who are the members of the network what are their voting powers you know which members what are their roles and responsibilities on this on this governance team what are their voting authorities what are the segregation of duties so our lawyer was asking is all the questions actually when we were sitting with them a couple of weeks ago he's like the guy who developed the court does he have access to github there's a person who had access to github you know most of the three you know he was questioning us on all of things and so we looked at segregation of duties then financial model you know there's so many POCs built but there is no financial model who is going to pay for the network you know how is the revenue that you collect on the network being going to be distributed how are you going to collect the revenues what kind of tokens are you going to issue so we we you know went through the process and listed that this is something essential when we look at governance and then on the right side you see technical operations management how do I ensure SLA so they SLA that one of the consortium members who wants to join our network said I want ninety-nine point nine nine nine three nines right so we then so in order to meet that SLA we have to figure out whether we have the right number of nodes whether if in one load goes down will the other node be affected what is their transaction through point to guarantee on an average 99.999% quality of service so configuration management issue management you know disaster recovery account management service management
these are all like standard items on operations management then standards and guidelines you know like when somebody wants to put a new contract into their network then are there any standards and guidelines that they need to follow what are the infrastructure policies suppose I want to bring my own node into the network and I want to bring my own server is there any guidelines in terms of what should be its sizing what should be the memory what should you know stuff like what should be installed on it what should not be installed so those are all considerations on standards and guidelines then we look at audit and controls what kind of audits are there you know like there are artists for Sox compliant that is artists for regular HIPPA compliance or what are the other things and do we have any tools that can detect malicious behavior or you know non-compliance and finally change management it's very essential because in the initial stages we are releasing 1.1 1.1 11.1 2 into the environment because there's a lot of change as testers come in and they're testing our solution so how do you manage all these changes you know
so we have governance contracts in some of the solutions we built we built contracts that are not directly impacting the solution but their governance car there are smart contracts that sit in front of the application contracts run on the blockchain and ensure that governance aspects are happening and then smart contracts itself Sochi how do you manage that the smart contracts and as well as your regular contracts who do who does who has to sign off on it have all the parties agreed to it you know can I deploy it now so those are the other aspects okay so this is like a there we notice that that big model cannot be done on one day so when we worked with one of the projects we had to time it so what do I do you know this is very important in the solutions you build it is a case by case in some solutions you may do all of it some of it is very important and some of it is not so what do we build in the first three months and what do we do you know what do we do before before we go into production we should have the articles of engagement and we should have the network operations and other things taken care of like what is your support model you know and what is your operations team going to look like what is their operations procedures those are all before you go into production but once you go into production what would you do in the first three months what should you have in place in the next six months and what should you have in there is 12 to 24 month period so this is what it lays out skipping to the next one I'm going to skip this a little bit but what I'm going to say is when we looked at security our lawyers and the security audit company started a question as like who are the officers in your company what kind of authority they have you know are they all like have they all signed NDA documents with the with a company have you had an NDA with the network participants so they started to question us in all different directions so we said like let us look at everything that needs to be really looked at in terms of security so you have to have insider threat is the biggest threat in in the network and so you know we have to when your lawyer works with you or when you're working with your consortium members you got to look at who are your key threats it's mainly insider threats a guy who knows the smart contracts very well is the biggest threat so you have to have things in place look at whether your use of security is in place how are you managing your keys you know do your keys leave out so
I did some of the work for the US federal government and so they have NIST standards and then when I was talking with the NIST you know consultant he was saying like new yorkese ever leave how long are they in memory so because these measuring the window of time when the keys can be in memory and can somebody steal it so he's asking me questions like how are you securing it so that there is no man-in-the-middle attacks so we said like let us look at how how are we securing the keys are the keys ever leaving a container and coming out or are we sending the encrypted encryption and decryption functions into the you know into the into the key management service tokens how are you securing your tokens how are you securing you know your databases off chain on chains so there was a big question like where is your data store you know if you do gdpr you know and there are certain rules that I learnt is like certain countries want the data to be in the nodes that are in their country specific data center so that you would face and then how are you securing them so that was you know on you know off chain data especially your configuration files you know if you look at fabric or even if you look at its helium networks there are so many configuration files and there are other files that you need to secure then how are you securing an application because that is user facing you know what kind of controls have you put in place and finally how are you securing your smart contracts you know are they exposed who all have authorization which ports are they running on are the endpoints visible I
you know so those are kind of things that we had to go through and finally you know if you are to put your entire solution together you have to look at the big picture right so blockchain is only one end of the spectrum but my clients would like to connect to the blockchain using their own clients that they weren't a design or they would like to use clients that we specifically give them you know if I work with large customers they want they want the API layer so that they can integrate it into their photos if I work with small customers they weren't the UI that we have customized and given it to them so you got to look at how are you exposing your API and in which languages are they available and then what is the UI UX taken going to be and messaging so a lot of our solutions use micro services you know like if I'm exposing s ap services I'm using micro services as a way of exposing functions to the blockchain network or to our application and finally on the extreme left is like how am i connecting to s AP in a secure manner how am i connecting to Arriba how am I connected Salesforce how am i connecting to anything else that's an enterprise apps that kind of like tells us you know what we really build our solutions on and this little piece tells us like this is our blockchain reference architecture for doing analysis and we already covered this before so and this is a piece of the reference architecture that our business analysts go and we have detailed X on what we actually asked questions when we work when our analysts work with the business participants like in the business model we have a series of 14 questions similarly you know when you study the organization's we ask questions like are they going to operate a node not operate a node if they are operating a node between two organizations do they need a secure channel non secure channels a lot of things I'm going to move into I do not know the time check got 15 more minutes
so let us see design patterns you know so one of the biggest things in a fabric its fabric gives you so many features that sometimes you could get lost right so one of the things is like you know where do I store my data you know this is a common question in every application that gets asked and then like how do I you know how many chain code should I have multiple chain codes on a single channel or should I spread the chain codes into multiple channels you know how many channels should I have between two nodes you can do all kinds of things in fabric and you can get completely lost a real complicated fabric solution can be multiple nodes multiple chain cause multiple channels between the same two nodes in fact in one of the solution there were multiple channels between inside the same node it was like a closed loop channel one channel two so that we could isolate out the ledger storage there are cases that I've come across so we have and then how do we design and court the solution and then we have faced now as the network expands in fabric and a new participant wants to come but they want to expand the network on their side but not be part of this portion of the network because in fabric a channel is like a private blockchain and you can have many private blockchains on the same network and they won't all be isolated but communicate as needed and last but not the least the business patterns so let us see what we did in in in data design patterns so when we started to analyze and many of the projects we noticed that there is data that goes into a public ledger that every member of the network wants to see transparent there are channels in which there is privacy between two parties on the network they are public but they are only visible to those two parties then we have like private information okay where do I store private information that is very specific to a particular organization and then there is confidential information that needs to be encrypted and finally there is like off chain information like for example GDP our data cannot be on the Block scenes though and there are also application specific information that drives your blocks in solution so how do we store so we came up with a very simple way of looking at it what we said is like you know if I have three parties right organization one two three and all the data is public then I need a single channel between all of them reading from left to right one collection it's all the data is public and so I have three organizations or one in our three peers then I would put them all on a single Channel now if our collection - where do r1 and r2 share public data and r3 r4 then I would have two channels between between the organization's so I mean this is kind of like a decomposition of our decision tree if I have something that is where let us say Prai you know that is partially private right and then I have collections that are like confidential that it could be confidential data purely confidential confidential data that actually sits on the ledger in that case I have to use encryption in fabric you can use techniques like sending transient I know you can use transient data to go into the block you know as and you can send the keys in and you can have your actual payload coming through another channel so you can do all these things if it is private in fabric you can use site DB so I can use all these multiple methods by which I can feed the data if I use the keys on the payload itself then it'll be visible on the ledger so you don't want that so how do I do that and then so finally you have like site DB because the data is private secure Keys uses it very effectively and we have used it in some trade finance applications I do not want to know how much I bid on it but it is private to me between me and my party but I do not want to expose my coat in trade finance right the suppliers invoice you know the buyers invoice is exposed by the supplier me gets bids from different financial institutions you if that data is very private you don't want it on the ledger the bit information then you can utilize site DB which is available in fabric so so private data on site DB and if the data is PII you know personally identifiable information then you put it off chain right so that is like kind of how we have we do our data modeling a little bit and the other thing is like channels you know you can have many channels between two parties there are many cases I'm going to just use one example in this pattern like let us say you know high availability so often it comes up you know people don't want to pay for nodes I do not know how many of you have actually costed how much your POC costs right appear if I were to use fabric and I know that well an organization cost you a thousand dollars and then a peer cost you a thousand dollars per month so technically speaking if there are two organizations two thousand dollars upfront cost and then two thousand per month so there are people there are organizations that want to invest in peers but there are some organisation one invest so I if in the first pattern I could have two peers that a particular organization hosts org one and R two has only one node but it trusts or two so if there's a failure on any of the nodes at least I have activity still going on but the still depends on how you model your endorsement policies and so on and so forth right
so that way you can see high availability you know to you know both organizations don't trust each other so I have two peers on each side then the next model is like network with management peers so there are two nodes which are organizational Ledger's and then there are two management peers that can store additional ledger information like audits and others that should not be visible to all the other organizations but it is visible only to the network so you can do similar models so there are like many things like single chat you know then other things are like single channel one chain code single channel I can now change code one two and three so I can I can I use this approach when we want to you know in fabric the tendency is to write one massive chain code but technically when I worked with Etherium you could actually slice your functions into smaller bits manageable smart contracts you can do the same thing in fabric and so you can do c1 c2 c3 as multiple chain cores running on it and the beauty is that each one of those smart contracts can talk to each other and update each other's ledger if you want to separate them completely then you can have multiple channels and each one up let us say there are two organizations they use the same smart contract but they want to isolate their Ledger's out for other purposes right like then I could have multiple channels with the same chain code running on the same Channel I could also have multiple chain codes running on different channels gonna skim through this and then coding I'm going to go here and some other patterns be used if I use Etherium I can actually have all the addresses inside a registry and I can figure out at runtime which change which smart contract is running whereby the address and I can actually communicate with contracts you know I can build a registry so we in some of the projects we have multiple chain codes so I need to have an effective way of managing them so we do use a registry pattern in which but in in unlike a tinea where I can model this inside as a smart contract we model this outside on the nor J's client we have a registry contract in which every chain code what is running what is its github location is a to register there and I can actually use that model to do a runtime install a instantiation because you can instantiate chain code you know from your client so if I wanted a nut if I use the template pattern I want chain code one and I want to reinstate chain code one again I can look at the registry get a copy of the code instantiated and deployed on any channel so I can use registry patterns I can use the routing patterns if I have a workflow on my application and depending on the workflow it has to call chain code one two three four we can use the routing pattern I learnt another thing in is helium is you actually isolate our data contracts from business contracts simply because you want to actually preserve the data all the time you know sir if you do chain code you can upgrade chain codes but actually the data moves from chain code version 1.1 to 1.2 but what I learnt while doing a tedium project says you can separate our data as a separate contract it maintains all the data in the ledger and business contract only does business functions so you can isolate our data versus business that way changes in your business logic will not impact your data you know those changes and data structures can actually impact your data structures but if you are storing everything in JSON structures it doesn't really matter you can continue using this so there are some workflow patterns we came up with dynamic instantiation I said I can look at the registry and dynamically instantiate contracts we can we wrote our own contracts for governance which may you know which manages contract rules and permissions management so that as soon as a transaction comes from node SDK it hits the verifier contract which verifies if that function is executable or not and then only route set to the appropriate contract you know that is supposed to run that function you also use the adapter because in supply chain especially there is a lot of data that is common to many different contracts but you had to translate them from one format to the other so you've done some of that you know then I ran into some of the network configuration patterns right it's a very simple network everyone shows us the POC with four nodes and a single Channel right I would like but we are gone into complexities because what happened is we started that way and this is actually an actually example of a procurement application but and what happened is one of the ends of the note said I want to now expand my own network I I'm a I'm a bi am a supplier but I have affiliate suppliers I do not want to you know make visible my affiliates to you so they expand on the left and each one of them could have their own node and have separate Ledger's each affiliate could be on a separate note and have a separate channel so that they can isolate their Ledger's and so they can expand on one side or sometimes that are very small affiliates they don't wanna operate a note so they come together and then they decide that I will use Nord C as a trusted anchor and we all will trust it and so affiliates could work with a single anchor node or affiliates could have their own nodes so a couple of different ways by which we have approached as our first app we got two of our applications I've finished 24 months you know we've been working on it for 24 months since you know August of 2016 so as the network expands we have to make sure that the network can scale and expand so many of the other ones are like how does it scale and finally how will it look like this and each one can then keep expanding there so you can see it's like a truly distributed network and finally I mean in all the negotiations we have a big problem you know the customers want to know where the opportunity is we waste a tremendous amount of time three three months and I'm deals with most of the customers all the time so we said like let's come up with something all right so respecting your time I know we're right at the ED here edge here I will just do a tell you why we think the business patterns are important and then we'll all just give you the survey of them these are all things that you guys have seen read about these are ones that we've happened to have the fortune of working on as well and and you've seen tremendous examples of many of these some have multiple patterns within them I can think of every ledger trade lens IBM food trust I know all of us have multiple these patterns but everything from identity management and the work being done with sovereign and indie is great border trade is huge digital asset registry auditing compliance financial settlement system of record data and document management secure trade finance disputes and reconciliation provenance asset track and trace again nothing you haven't read about we got a little bit more detail on each of these the reason we we have these and we think they're important is when we go in and to do that analysis we're trying to make sure we're solving a problem that should be solved with blockchain we're not just trying to throw blockchain as a hammer and trying to find a problem for it to solve and that's one of the big things we going with companies and companies always almost always start with my I want to own it you know the just typical enterprises and we have to start talking to about consortium building and thinking about how to decentralize it in some way and you can still have some traditional models or the SAS models and all but you want to you want to build the trust through some descendant some centralization mechanism you want to solve data problems with solutions that solve data problems and we want to make sure that we're positioning them so if they do leverage blockchain that is solving a problem today and also positioning them for more you know features in the future so they can continue to take advantage of blockchain in other areas of their business and that's one of the reasons we we love fabric is that it is pluggable and we do know that this is very nascent technology and it's going to continue to evolve and that that pluggable nature is going to make the investment that companies do today pay off more in the future than having to throw away everything and start over each time so again you guys are having great hanging out I will we will take some questions and I'm gonna let no I think the questions and most of that information was his are there any question yes well you know so we've done several projects I'm gonna let start we do track and trace it's been 24 months we've done procurement and contingent labor that's 24 months in in going from MVP you've done seven projects for the federal government from logistics - you know secure words and stuff like that we've done what equal compliance where audit ability of you know of a manufacturer to our distributor to a end customer there are so many other examples we can use we have done trade finance so just curious can you provide some metrics on these projects like how many participants are in this consortium how many nodes they're running like how many locations in etc so you can take the biggest one for example yes so you know so our own network you know so that's the solution we are having is two nodes right now okay which is going into production we have three companies that are signed up but the thing is like before a node can operate I have to finish the memorandum of understanding and other things the legal obligations so even though there are far you know I can say one two three four five members have signed up the legal contracts before they can come on board is taking us time so that would be our own trust your supplier on the network ultimately we expect 15 nodes when all of them sign up and we will have at least 20,000 suppliers overall to begin with you know so by the end of 2019 or the first quarter of this that many we expect them to sign up as passive users they won't operate notes for I told two of the networks I showed you where I've saying scalability they started off with two nodes which means they've the procurement application especially the client and their supplier it started off too and now what happened as others have expressed interest the the the supplier said I want to expand the network to my this so we the supplier is negotiating with their suppliers they go through the same process so we know you know that that's how it is going to expand so day one it starts centralized somewhat and as the network grows that's when it gets truly decentralized so this is the teething problem in getting production networks up and running it's not like you cannot put fight I have a final network and I can put finals you know but that doesn't mean anything you know our own solution we'll have two management nodes one for analytics and one for key management and one will be the first anchor client and then the second will be us as network our and network managers and verifiers of the network and then other selection ah yeah as I was running down to I was expecting something like saxman or toga and if you such guys so when we come it when we communicate with sa P yeah you know so I'm a to have certified architect okay so some of my thought process is always toga I need to know what the business does and then how does it translate into different layers right so application information in this but then we said the blockchain is not in TOGAF yet and when we go to customers - when we saw those layers have to be understood you know the workbook includes like when we do data analysis we say is this confidential is it proprietary to organisation 1 or is common so we do the whole nine yards of analysis so that first few layers actually helps us to crystallize the solution all right but when we talk to sa P we are negotiating actually I mean like your question was that so we have to work with s a P and a civvy architects and we try to negotiate what the data is gonna be whether there's an Oracle that will be provided by them or do we create the API sand will they just most often we like to create API so REST API so that they consume it rather than having point-to-point integrations or message based integrations all right well we'llChainyard, and our co-founder, Sai Nidamarty, has been featured in this month’s edition of Startup City Magazine. (pages 28-29).
Read the full Chainyard Startup City article.
Chainyard has been named by LinkedIn as one of the top three companies where Blockchain developers work, along with IBM and ConsenSys.
Blockchain Developer also topped the list of emerging jobs in 2018, with an outstanding 33x growth. Runner up was Machine Learning Engineer, with 12x growth, followed by Application Sales Executive.
Click here to read the LinkedIn 2018 Emerging Jobs Report.
The goal of this new editor is to make adding rich content to WordPress simple and enjoyable. This whole post is composed of pieces of content—somewhat similar to LEGO bricks—that you can move around and interact with. Move your cursor around and you’ll notice the different blocks light up with outlines and arrows. Press the arrows to reposition blocks quickly, without fearing about losing things in the process of copying and pasting.
What you are reading now is a text block, the most basic block of all. The text block has its own controls to be moved freely around the post…
… like this one, which is right aligned.
Headings are separate blocks as well, which helps with the outline and organization of your content.
Handling images and media with the utmost care is a primary focus of the new editor. Hopefully, you’ll find aspects of adding captions or going full-width with your pictures much easier and robust than before.
Try selecting and removing or editing the caption, now you don’t have to be careful about selecting the image or other text by mistake and ruining the presentation.
Imagine everything that WordPress can do is available to you quickly and in the same place on the interface. No need to figure out HTML tags, classes, or remember complicated shortcode syntax. That’s the spirit behind the inserter—the (+) button you’ll see around the editor—which allows you to browse all available content blocks and add them into your post. Plugins and themes are able to register their own, opening up all sort of possibilities for rich editing and publishing.
Go give it a try, you may discover things WordPress can already add into your posts that you didn’t know about. Here’s a short list of what you can currently find there:
A huge benefit of blocks is that you can edit them in place and manipulate your content directly. Instead of having fields for editing things like the source of a quote, or the text of a button, you can directly change the content. Try editing the following quote:
The editor will endeavour to create a new page and post building experience that makes writing rich posts effortless, and has “blocks” to make it easy what today might take shortcodes, custom HTML, or “mystery meat” embed discovery.
Matt Mullenweg, 2017
The information corresponding to the source of the quote is a separate text field, similar to captions under images, so the structure of the quote is protected even if you select, modify, or remove the source. It’s always easy to add it back.
Blocks can be anything you need. For instance, you may want to add a subdued quote as part of the composition of your text, or you may prefer to display a giant stylized one. All of these options are available in the inserter.
You can change the amount of columns in your galleries by dragging a slider in the block inspector in the sidebar.
If you combine the new wide and full-wide alignments with galleries, you can create a very media rich layout, very quickly:
Sure, the full-wide image can be pretty big. But sometimes the image is worth it.
The above is a gallery with just two images. It’s an easier way to create visually appealing layouts, without having to deal with floats. You can also easily convert the gallery back to individual images again, by using the block switcher.
Any block can opt into these alignments. The embed block has them also, and is responsive out of the box:
You can build any block you like, static or dynamic, decorative or plain. Here’s a pullquote block:
Code is Poetry
The WordPress community
If you want to learn more about how to build additional blocks, or if you are interested in helping with the project, head over to the GitHub repository.
Thanks for testing Gutenberg!
Today we announce that Chainyard has joined Hyperledger, adding to the positive momentum Hyperledger is experiencing. Hyperledger is an open source collaborative effort created to advance cross-industry blockchain technologies. It is a global collaboration, hosted by The Linux Foundation, including leaders in finance, banking, Internet of Things, supply chains, manufacturing and Technology.
Hyperledger holds the distinction of being the fastest growing project launched by The Linux Foundation. Hyperledger now includes five different Blockchain framework projects: Hyperledger Fabric, Burrow, Iroha, Sawtooth and Indy and with the addition of over dozens of new members in the past few months, over 250 participating companies.
Chainyard’s membership in Hyperledger gives us more direct ability to contribute to the worldwide network of professionals who are working together to research, develop and advance blockchain technologies. Our membership means that our blockchain experts will have a comprehensive view and are on the leading edge when it comes to recommending new solutions and providing blockchain services.
We are very excited to be moving from a contributor to general member with Hyperledger. This gives us more opportunities to co-create value that will directly benefit the blockchain open source ecosystem
Isaac Kunkel, Chainyard VP of Consulting
Making the decision to join was easy since Hyperledger’s objectives of maintaining openness, transparency and interoperability of blockchain technologies reflects our own vision. We see the potential for blockchain to significantly alter existing business models by development of decentralized networks that facilitate business through decreased complexity, increased efficiency, improved security and potential for new revenue streams to benefit all members of the network.
After working with Hyperledger for nearly three years, we have made a strategic decision to participate in a way that reinforces our vision, strategy and commitment to the Hyperledger project and further contribute to the technology stack. The team helps to build, maintain and support the infrastructure necessary to develop the early releases of Fabric. In partnership with IBM, the framework for CI/CD/CT and other development, performance test and support activities are maintained.
This global journey has enabled us to meet with many Blockchain enthusiasts from Austin to Boston, New York to San Francisco and Toronto to Singapore. We have had the privilege of speaking at IBM’s Think Conferences, demoing at Consensus Conference and attending many other Blockchain conferences and meet-ups. Along the way, Hyperledger Fabric has matured, first with the GA release of Fabric 1.0 in July 2017, then the major upgrade release to Fabric 1.1 in March 2018 and most recently with the major upgrade release to Fabric 1.2 earlier this month, July 2018. The community releases are global in scale with efforts from hundreds of developers and dozens of companies. The collaboration of developers, scientists and businesses continue to push the platform forward to be the best choice for blockchain for business, that is, blockchain focused on permissioned, private networks built to solve business problems.
With the tremendous amount of collaboration going on in the community the technical acumen of the blockchain community has matured. This includes maturity in blockchain concepts, blockchain platform fundamentals, agile development practices, automated testing frameworks, performance testing frameworks, DevOps capabilities, cloud engineering and network security.
The growth has enabled POCs to transition to real world solutions across many disparate industries including financial, transportation, food, healthcare and mining. The platform and momentum have enabled us to work on solutions in supply chain including track-and-trace, procurement and compliance. With the combination of Hyperledger Fabric and IBM Blockchain Platform, we have built ready for prime-time business solutions.
Earlier this year we announced the launch of Chainyard, a wholly owned subsidiary of IT People Corporation. This was done to demonstrate our focus and commitment to blockchain technologies. Joining Hyperledger reinforces leadership’s commitment and focus on Blockchain for Business and our belief in the transformational nature of the technology. We are confident many others will be joining us in the future.
Hyperledger, an open source collaborative effort created to advance cross-industry blockchain technologies, today announced it has surpassed the 250 member mark with the addition of Chainyard.
Read more about Chainyard joining the Hyperledger here.
This article was originally published on LinkedIn
I have always been curious about how we manage releases of the Fabric images to the Hyperledger community for all the platforms consistently, continuously and with such efficiency since 2016. A couple of weeks ago, Chainyard sponsored and hosted the July JAM (Jenkins Triangle Area Meetup) Organized by the Cloud bees team. Our DevOps expert Ramesh Thoomu (Chainyard) and Will Refvem (Solution Architect) from CloudBees presented a session on Jenkins Job builder (JJB). Around 30 members from different organizations (CloudBees, Redhat, IBM etc.) joined the conversation.
Jenkins Job Builder is a tool to automate the Jenkins job configuration. This gives lot flexibility and consistent way of managing the jobs. JJB gives flexible options to manage jobs as shown below:
A Job configuration on Jenkins UI involves specifying Job Name, Description, Properties, Parameters, SCM, Triggers, Build Environment, Build and Post-build actions. A Hyperledger-Fabric project team is usually working on multiple branches across multiple build platforms. Take an example of a simple job, which one can trigger on “master”, “feature”, “development” branches and on “x86_64” and “s390x” platforms. This can end up creating 6 Jenkins Job on Jenkins UI. This process takes a lot of mouse clicks and results in creating redundant job configuration and manual process. Managing all these jobs is a cumbersome task and can introduce errors if the process is not consistent.
JJB can tremendously simplify the problem. Job templates use Job definitions and modules to fulfill all the above Jenkins job requirements. Within Hyperledge-Fabric release process, the team is successfully managing 100s of Jenkins jobs easily with Jenkins job templates supporting seamless release process. The newer version of JJB supports a Jenkins pipeline plugin which makes things easier to create a touch-less seamless integration on CI/CT/CD, avoiding redundant job configuration and managing the jobs using simple yaml or json formatted configuration files.
This article was originally published on LinkedIn
Earlier this week, I had the opportunity to participate in the annual National Retail Federation Tech 2018 conference in San Francisco, attended by over 100 C-Level Retail Execs. Earlier on Sunday, Brian Behlendorf, Executive Director of the Hyperledger Project, had briefed the CIO council about Hyperledger. The event kicked-off on Sunday with two fantastic key-note addresses. The first one by Amy Trask, CBS Sports Analyst and former CEO of the Oakland Raiders had one message – “understand your Fans” which in retail parlance translates to understanding your customers. At one point she talked about how she would spend her time in the stands with her fans rather than the special boxes. While understanding what the quantitative data is telling is important, qualitative data is as important if not more.
The second keynote was delivered by Shabnam Mogharabi, CEO of Soul Pancakes, a content creation company. Her entire message was about how to tell a good story that connects with your audience. The customer appreciated “positive uplifting content, filled with energy, liveliness and vibrancy”. There are “22 rules to story telling”. She added another dimension of “emotional data” to what Amy had said earlier. In order to tell an authentic story, one has to “create discomfort that leads to real + vulnerable stories”. A viral story is short lived impact but a story with a virus spreads and can sustain audience attention for longer periods of time.
Monday morning kicked off with Andrea Wasserman (VP of Retail Experience at Verizon). The first speaker was Katie Finnegan who kick started Walmart’s Store #8 initiative – an innovation center for understanding customer behavior to evolve future retail strategies. Each idea went thru a “Shark Tank” process where each selected candidate would present a “Point of View of the Future” as in a C-Series pitch. Once an idea is taken forward, that innovation was treated as a separate business with its own CEO and accounting head.
I heard concepts like story telling, content pitching, immersive retailing and PoC. The Store #8 incubation process follows a “design-> initiate-> build-> iterate-> minimum viable scale-> evaluate” approach.
Ajit Sivadasan of Lenovo stressed that while strategy discussions are great, executing the strategy is where the rubber hits the road. It took them several years to come to where they are today. Starting with collection of data and reporting, today they are at a point where they use AI and machine learning capabilities to gain insights. They had significant challenges at the beginning, but today they utilize data sciences to innovate or get answers that were previously not intuitive.
During the breakfast, I met Raghu Sagi, the Chief Engineering Officer of Sephora. I have to admit I am not keeping up with the trends and had to ask him what does Sephora do. Their strategy was to give the “lady” a connected experience throughout from home to the store or connecting with their friends and other users. A key to their strategy is to create individual experiences for each woman and simplifying the user experience across all channels.
Maryanne Byrdak, SVP & CIO of Potbelly said that while they are still dealing with legacy systems transformation, their strategy is to protect their brand and be selective on which channel they want to leverage. For example, they would not want their sandwiches delivered with some other brand food products in certain channels. For Potbelly its important to focus on the “Right Price, Right Time and Right Experience”.
Julie Averill , CTO of Lululemon shared an interesting story at Nordstrom about how IT was perceived as an “Electrical Closet” that only mattered when something went down. For Lululemon, business acumen, inspired partnership and strategic relationships with customers are important. She talked about “Speed to change and innovate”, “emotional fitness” and “accountable for commitments” as key to their business.
The CIO of Levi Strauss & Co, Chris Clark shared changes in the perception of IT as a partner who sits on the table with the business as opposed to being in the background as a service provider. The Strauss family is very interested in understanding technology trends and want it to be an integral factor in formulating business and financial plans.
Brandless is another startup that focuses on retail and feeding America through a community approach. According to Tina Sharkley, the founder, through supplier relationships and optimizing the supply chain and cost model, they have kept the pricing of any product at $3. They work with the community and through focus groups understand the needs and behavior of their customer.
Karen Etzkorn leads the Curate group (HSN, QVC, Zulily) and through acquisitions they have grown and also been saddled with disparate technologies. However, she points out that they are extracting the best from each of the entities and applying it across others. Agility and agile methods are very important to them and most importantly “making risk cheap”.
The most illustrative painting of the future came from Peter Schwartz of Salesforce. Kicking of his presentation with a clip from Minority Report, he said that the future will be touchless and based on based on sound, personal digital assistants and intelligent devices communicating with each other, They will understand every move the consumer and personalizing everything. Peter talked about individual personalization using Netflix as an example. At Netflix, they study individual behavior and make minor changes to the UX/UI to tailor the experience based on learning. For example, Peter watches war movies where the selection is limited and hence it tries to steer Peter towards other themes.
His presentation was preceded by two startups “Hingto” and “Lisnr” both looking at changing retail experiences. The theme of “Hingeto” was “anyone can make, anyone can design, anyone can ship, and anyone can buy anywhere” all without locking up inventory. On the other hand, “Lisnr” hopes to change experience including payments using near-ultrasonic, ultra-low power data transmission technology that enables fast, reliable, and secure communication between devices via any speaker and/or microphone.
I noticed that there was limited understanding of “Blockchain” among the attendees, and how it could disrupt the industry. I spoke with several folks including NRF, Sonoma-Williams, Ralph Lauren, Sephora, Zebra, Hughes, Remini, For Eyes, Richemont and Stein Mart about Enterprise Blockchain in Supply Chain. I had some detail chat with Janet Sherlock CEO of Ralph Lauren and Susan from American Eagle about supply chain settlements using blockchain to improve operational efficiencies, reduce disputes and eliminate reconciliations.
I attended the conference as the CTO of Chainyard which is the Technical Partner of Bleexy. @Argentina Moise, the CEO of Bleexy presented the vision of an integrated network of market places that leverage both public and private blockchains, enabled by smart contracts to initiate cross market place transactions and settlements. Bleexy provides a platform for retailers to collaborate in a trustless, transparent environment, yet support privacy and confidentiality. The Bleexy demo can be viewed by clicking here.
There was a presentation by Ryan Orr, co-founder of Chronicled about blockchain. He painted a weaker picture of several features such as key management and privacy still lacking in blockchains and that one in five who claim to be blockchain experts is bluffing. My strong feeling is that they work in the Ethereum space where many of these features have to be custom integrated to create private blockchains. Hyperledger-Fabric, while still advancing, provides native capability to address many of these challenges through the availability of channels, sideDB, service discovery, encryption on the chain, zero knowledge proofs, certificate authorities and member services and many more.
In summary, retail has several challenges in fast changing environment that include compliance with PCI, GDPR, protecting brand reputation, protecting, employees and understanding patterns of transactions. While many retailers are struggling with legacy systems and transformation, others see Amazon both as driving innovation at a a tremendous pace and a threat to their existence. Retail innovation is experimenting with several technologies such as chat bots, digital voice assistants, augmented reality, gamification approaches, avatars, social media, AI/ML and in store technologies such as smart devices, listeners, voice and facial recognition. Personalization is now at an individual level. Of course Price and Value are still very important. Innovations in retail have focused on several emerging technologies – data sciences being on the top.
The NRF has done a fabulous job of hosting this event. The event was held at the beautiful Ritz-Carlton in San Francisco. The event kicked off on Sunday and gave plenty of opportunity to learn about the trends in retail. For a change, the sponsors did not have to put up booths and hang around which was a welcome relief. The breaks in between, the lunch, cocktail hour, dinner and post dinner cocktails all offered enough time to understand and chat with attendees. The food was excellent and had a variety for the foodie. Loved the interaction with the NRF Leadership. Thank you NRF for a beautiful event.
This article was originally published on LinkedIn
Last week on Thurs and Fri, RTP held the 2018 #IoTSlam (https://iotslam.com/). Thanks to David Hill, I had the chance to become familiar about the community and attend this exciting event and the sessions. The annual event by the #IoT Community was well orchestrated from start to finish.
My first exposure to sensor technology goes back to 1984 when I was working with Dr. Sunderrajan, Head of Research at DCM Data Products, India. I was supporting DCM Data Loggers and PLCs, and learning about Process Control Systems. Our core product was MICON from Powell Systems, USA. Connectivity was achieved via daisy chaining RS232C ports and MUX cards. We were controlling processes by measuring humidity, temperature and other parameters that drive paper and nylon industries .
The primary goal of the IOT Community is to educate developers, thought leaders and C-levels, and drive the adoption of IoT within the enterprise through various means such as their expert working groups, CoE initiatives, advisory groups and events. I spoke with some of the Sponsors such as IBM, SAS, DNA Group, SIMTelligent and RIOT and got to understand the work that this community has been doing.
The key note addresses by Chris O’Conner (IBM GM of IOT) provided great insights into the science. He illustrated the volume of data being generated and how analytics is helping address problems and identify new revenue streams. The CTO of SAS Software Mr. Oliver Scambenberger talked about the progresses leading to IoT and AI, and the SAS Strategy around IOT and tools to process data in real time using statistical tools and machine learning. Some key enablers for IoT and AI are advances in #5G, sensor technology and availability of AI and cognitive platforms like #IBM #Watson. They have enabled key developments such as machine/computer vision, connectivity, automation, augmentation, image recognition and intelligence.
Some cool messages include – “Data without Analytics is unrealized value, and Analytics without Monetization is unrealized revenue”.
The evolution of sensor technology has greatly helped in the adoption of IoT based applications especially in #HealthCare, #Logistics and #Supplychain. Advancement in 5G is enabling the driver-less revolution such as see-thru sensing, autopilot driving, platooning, advanced entertainment, augmented and virtual reality. Sensor technology is being applied to railroads to address the Positive Train Control mandate. They also help with managing rail safety via sensors attached to axles, wheels and ball-bearings.
With so many devices communicating on the network, the need for security becomes a key concern to prevent a variety of threats ranging from DoS , ransom attacks, spamming to infiltration. Someone talked about a great example from Vegas where millions were stolen from a casino just by attacking a harmless IoT based fish tank thermometer. Nancy Shemwell, CEO of Entegra and Dipto Chakravarty of Echostar emphasized the importance of security.
I really enjoyed @Rahul Vijay, Global Head of Telecom at Uber, talk about the various Uber Businesses and how IoT is a key driver behind all their future business strategies.
I explored the relevance of #blockchain with many of the minds out there for both identity and access management (#IAM) of IoT devices, maintain accurate records of important IoT readings as inn #coldchain #supplychain applications or even better, drive IoT behavior or workflows through #smartcontracts .
Chainyard’s Senior Vice President of Consulting, Isaac Kunkel, was invited to guest post over at IBM’s Blockchain Unleashed blog this week. In his post, Isaac looks back on the journey that Chainyard has taken within the realm of blockchain, and our experience with using Hyperledger Fabric.
“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”
One famous proverb states that “a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” In this proverb we learn that something which takes time begins with an initial action. For most, the blockchain journey starts with the adrenaline fueled feelings associated with trading cryptocurrency. For IT People Corporation, it began with an opportunity to contribute to The Linux Foundation’s Hyperledger Fabric open source project starting in late 2015.
The team was assembled to help build and support the infrastructure necessary to develop the early releases of Fabric. In partnership with IBM, the framework for continuous integration and testing, along with other development, performance test and support activities, were built.
With contributions by dozens of engineers and companies, the early releases started to come together allowing early, pre-release solutions to be initiated, first with release 0.3, then release 0.5 in March 2016 and then with the first official release of 0.6 in September 2016.
Chainyard specializes in advising and supporting small, medium and enterprise companies in Blockchain.
Enterprises are exploring new ways to work with their suppliers and competitors using Blockchain-based business networks. They need to understand the new opportunities and threats that emerge because of the new models Blockchain enables.
Chainyard specializes in advising and supporting small, medium and enterprise companies in Blockchain.
Because we work closely with members of the Hyperledger foundation and are actively involved in the Blockchain community, we’re able to provide our clients with expert insight into the Blockchain landscape to determine the most valuable Blockchain solution implementation for your business.
We’ll work closely with you to help define a successful strategy focused on Blockchain adoption, development, and implementation.
You can continue reading the rest of the article over at IBM’s Blockchain Unleashed blog.
