Study of Blockchain-as-a-Service Systems with a Case Study of Hyperledger Fabric Implementation on Kubernetes

Blockchain is a shared, immutable, decentralized ledger to record the transaction history. Blockchain technology has changed the world, changed the way we do the business. It has transformed the commerce across every industry, which may be supply chain, IoT, financial services, banking, healthcare, agriculture and many more. It had introduced a new way of transactional applications that bring trust, security, transparency and accountability. To develop any blockchain use case, the main task is to develop an environment for creating and deploying the application. In our case, we created an environment on IBM Cloud Kubernetes service using Kubernetes, a container orchestration tool and implemented Hyperledger Fabric network to create and deploy blockchain applications. Implementing Hyperledger Fabric business blockchain network on IBM Cloud Kubernetes service provides several advantages. We can have multiple users work on the same setup. Moreover, this setup can be used and reused for many different blockchain applications as well as for deploying chaincodes and smart contracts. Fabric components can accomplish high availability by deploying on Kubernetes. We can execute several isolated Fabric instances on our Kubernetes platform as it supports multi-tenancy. This makes it easier for us to develop and test the blockchain applications. Hyperledger Fabric and Kubernetes, both if used together delivers a powerful and secure platform for processing blockchain transactions