Hyperledger sailing in the clouds
Allow me to puzzle some of you with this sentence: "docker containers running Hyperledger images hosted on Softlayer or Azure cloud centers spread across the globe and executing simultaneously the chaincode of a smart contract containing the logic of a multi-company business process".
If you can’t make any sense of it, don’t worry too much because most of the words didn’t exist a few years ago but consider that there is something you may be missing. Actually, you are seeing the implementation of that fancy sentence on the picture above these lines.
A few years ago, as I worked on designing on-premise clusters for high-performance analytics and transactions, I thought I had already seen the ultimate system architecture for business networks but, as the screenshot taken from a recent engagement proves, I was wrong.
During the last weeks, I witnessed how a transactional system could be built across the Earth and hosted by different cloud vendors and, of course, running on quite different hardware. No add-ons to replicate data, maintain the consistency or guarantee the high availability, disaster recovery and transaction tampering. The blockchain technology, the Hyperledger to be more specific, was doing its work running on IBM and Microsoft data centers. I think one of my customers didn’t believe me as I told him that it was possible and that is why we implemented it together. It simply worked...but no wonder: that is what it is has been designed for. This system architecture makes sense and is feasible.
Certainly, I am not talking about core banking, heavy stock trading applications and alike. Those systems are real, productive, technologically "state of the art" and mature. They have no need for essential mutations, like the blockchain imposes. Ultimately, they are a very successful species, optimally adapted to their ecosystem. I am talking about applications born to live in new ecosystems that the blockchain technology makes possible i.e. many different companies working together on a common business process, chained by the trust that crypto technology imposes and driven by a digital strategy. Well, I have just defined the blockchain as I understand it (another fancy sentence, right?).
The reason why I am writing this post is that I reflected a lot about the existence and the evolution of both the traditional and emerging architectures. Just like the new businessess need to cooperate with the traditional ones, different IT-ecosystems are doomed to co-exist. They simply need to, if they want to survive…resistance is futile. Hence, I think we have a very rewarding and exciting task in front of us, which is working on the integration of the blockchain ecosystem with the well-established and mature environments. I am looking forward to seeing (and contributing to) the born of new species and I encourage you to stay tuned to all the wonders that IT can make for the business.
