The Alibaba Cloud Container Service team released a solution for automatic configuration and deployment of blockchain at the 2017 Hangzhou Yunqi Conference, and it was officially launched on Alibaba Cloud's domestic website today.
Blockchain (Blockchain) has received more and more attention in the world in recent years, attracting more and more developers, enterprises, universities, research institutions, government organizations, etc. to participate in the research and exploration of blockchain technology and applications among. The essence of blockchain is a tamper-proof, shared distributed ledger technology, which is based on distributed consensus algorithms, smart contracts, encryption algorithms, etc., and can solve the problem of transactions in the absence of credit. In recent years, many innovative business scenarios based on blockchain have emerged in various industries, such as digital bills, asset custody, logistics and shipping, food and drug safety and traceability, public welfare, digital content copyright, etc.
At present, there are a variety of blockchain implementation technologies in the industry. The most influential in the open source field is the Hyperledger series of projects under the Linux Foundation, especially the Hyperledger Fabric blockchain framework implementation. Hyperledger Fabric is based on a modular architecture, designed for enterprise-level blockchain applications and solutions, with good scalability, high availability, security and other characteristics.
In supporting the development of blockchain applications and solutions, the Hyperledger organization and the industry provide a series of documents, examples, tools, and active community support to help users easily build a blockchain development environment locally. However, deploying blockchains in enterprise-level distributed environments and cloud environments is not an easy task. This involves the configuration and invocation of blockchain-related tools, the design of blockchain network topology, the secure distribution of certificates and keys, the high availability of components and services, the elastic expansion of business processing capabilities, and the persistence of data. Consideration and design require developers to have an in-depth understanding of blockchain-related technologies and the support of professional and complete enterprise infrastructure and resource services. In addition, the configuration and deployment process of the blockchain involves a large number of configuration objects. The process is cumbersome and interrelated, and the probability of errors is high. Frequent end-to-end testing is required to ensure the correct configuration and deployment of the blockchain, which is time-consuming Hours or even days. In this case, developers cannot focus on the development of blockchain upper-layer applications and business innovation, which greatly affects the rapid iteration and rapid launch of applications and solutions.
In response to these series of pain points and needs, the Alibaba Cloud Container Service team released a solution for automatic configuration and deployment of blockchain at the 2017 Hangzhou Yunqi Conference, which was officially launched on Alibaba Cloud's domestic website today.
The Alibaba Cloud Container Service blockchain solution is a simple and flexible general-purpose basic solution. It mainly serves the development and testing of blockchain applications and solutions, providing developers with a low-threshold and efficient way to use blockchain. The main advantages of this blockchain solution are as follows:
1. Applicable to the agility requirements of development and testing environments, and deployment time is reduced from days to minutes;
2. Fully automated configuration generation, eliminating manual errors;
3. Built-in best practices , the configuration and deployment of the blockchain network can be completed in one step without rework.
The comparison of the time consumption between using the manual method and using the blockchain solution method is as follows:
The usage process of Alibaba Cloud Container Service blockchain solution is shown in the following figure:
在区块链解决方案的图形化向导中，我们抽取出最关键的几组参数提供给开发者进行定制化配置，同时也提供了标准的默认值以进一步方便开发者的使用。当点下“部署区块链网络”的按钮之后，在底层，区块链解决方案将自动完成大量复杂的参数设置、工具调用、模板生成、证书和文件分发、区块链部署等工作。开发者只需等待数分钟，便能得到一套全新定制的区块链网络。在区块链解决方案的帮助下，即使开发者面对来自市场和业务方频繁多变的需求，也可以轻松实现高效、灵活的闭环开发模式，加速开发迭代。
在完成区块链网络的部署之后，开发者可以通过CLI命令行、SDK应用程序、区块链管理监控工具等方式开始访问区块链网络，进行区块链应用和解决方案的开发、测试工作。区块链解决方案支持符合Hyperledger Fabric标准的SDK应用程序和管理监控工具（如Hyperledger Explorer或者第三方实现）直接访问区块链网络上的服务。同时，为提升应用和工具的配置效率，我们提供了示例程序和示例工具演示如何实现一键下载所有区块链网络配置，实现应用和工具对区块链网络的快速无缝对接。另一方面，这些SDK应用程序、区块链管理监控工具既可以部署在远程环境中，也可以部署在阿里云容器服务的容器集群之上。
作为区块链解决方案的部署平台，阿里云容器服务的容器集群具备企业级的强大功能特性和可靠性保障，在公共云上支撑着数以万计的生产级容器部署，并积累了丰富的企业级容器技术研发和运维的经验，集成了应用容器化的大量最佳实践。同时，阿里云上完善的基础资源和服务为构建全方位、全生命周期的区块链企业应用解决方案提供了强大的支撑，让开发者和企业实现一站式规划、采购、配置、开发、上线、运维。
未来，我们将根据市场的需求，不断完善对公共云、专有云、混合云等不同部署形态，以及对阿里云国内站和国际站等不同区域的更为全面的覆盖。
"If you don't accumulate a few steps, you can't reach a thousand miles; if you don't accumulate a small stream, you can't make a river." Alibaba Cloud's container service blockchain solution is just our first step in the blockchain field. We need to work with the blockchain ecosystem to better promote the implementation of blockchain applications and the commercialization of blockchain in the cloud. We welcome developers to actively feedback functional requirements and improvement opinions to help the continuous improvement and upgrading of blockchain solutions; at the same time, we also welcome partners to further build more comprehensive blocks on top of this basic solution Blockchain-as-a-Service, and blockchain business solutions closer to the industry.