Hyperledger – the Linux Foundation’s blockchain-for-business project – should enter 2019 with the completion of two major framework projects.
However, its Compose development tools and framework has been delayed, after key contributors were reassigned.
Iroha – for permissioned blockchain – and Indy – tackling distributed identity – will jointly hit the all-important 1.0 release milestone during the first quarter, Hyperledger executive director Brian Behlendorf told the Hyperledger Global Forum in Basel, Switzerland, on Wednesday.
Iroha and Indy are two of the five Hyperledger framework projects. The others include: Burrow, a smart contract management and Apache-licensed implementation of the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) bytecode interpreter; Sawtooth for distributed ledgers; and Fabric.
Behlendorf told DevClass: “Version 1.0 is intended to be a sign from core maintainers on a project they are happy to see people they’ve never met use that code in a production environment. They’ll not have solved every bug but they’ve sawn off the sharp edges.”
However, there’s a setback for those expecting Hyperledger’s Composer development tools and framework designed to model blockchain and cut deployment from weeks to months.
The project, currently v0.20.5, is understood to be 1.0 ready but suffered a small but significant drain of developers – two IBMers re-assigned by their corporate parent.
Behlendorf said: “These projects don’t get cancelled just because somebody decides to leave. They can change hands – that’s part of the strength – but this team is still figuring out what they want to do. If the new team wants to take a bit more of a different approach then it might be more of a restart.”
Fabric, the basis of Hyperledger, is expected to hit version 1.4 before the end of this year.
Hyperledger is three-years old and today boasts more than 260 members, including giants such as IBM and Microsoft.
Looking further out into 2019, Behlendorf reckoned certification of cloud providers is the next step for this Linux-Foundation-backed project.
Certification would help prove to customers Hyperledger can scale with the addition of new nodes and in multi-cloud environments. AWS announced Hyperledger on its IaaS in November.
“Solutions” providers and vendors will also be targeted with certification akin to the Linux Foundation’s Kubernetes certification. The goal next year is for “thousands” of individual, “tens” of companies and “as many as possible” solutions providers to become certified in 2019.
It’s intended to help take Hyperledger from proof of concept to production deployment.
So, too, is splicing Blockchain with other, existing open-source projects – thereby bringing it more to the attention of developers working on code at the grass-roots, infrastructure level.
“We also need to reach beyond the Blockchain world to other open-source projects that are trying to solve higher-level problems,” Behlendorf told us. “A hallmark of our success would be the ability to point to other projects on GitHub that have dependencies on Hyperledger.”
Which projects?
“Any that consult a central database or audit trail. I put that out there to see what it would trigger. To me that would show you are part of the infrastructure,” Behlendorf told DevClass.