Oracle announced the addition of new capabilities drawn from Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Hyperledger Fabric. According to Oracle, the new release reflects customers’ growing needs for resilience and high availability, scale-up, and scale-out to handle growing workloads.
Quickly set up
The Oracle Blockchain Platform was designed for provisioning blockchain networks, join other organizations, and deploy & run smart contracts to update and query the ledger. This service can be quickly set up an enhanced Hyperledger Fabric, member-governed blockchain for secure, real-time data sharing and trusted transactions among business partners.
Oracle’s group VP of blockchain product development, Frank Xiong, said,
“The Oracle Blockchain Platform aims to bring ‘a new level’ of deployment for organizations that have enterprise blockchain applications running on Oracle Cloud infrastructure. It’s designed and developed to meet our customers’ growing demand for a more resilient, secure, and scalable platform that’s ready for growing workloads of enterprise blockchain applications in numerous use cases across various industries.”
With this release, the platform offers a new blockchain consensus mechanism based on RAFT protocol. This mechanism supports greater decentralization for business networks and enables multiple participants to run and contribute orderer nodes to the network for more shared governance.
Oracle outlines further updates to Oracle Blockchain Platform Cloud Service:
- The ability to choose between development-oriented Standard SKU and production-grade Enterprise SKU, which provides multiple shapes, high availability, and supports dynamic scalability
- On-demand storage capacity, which customers can add to an instance when needed
- Automatic deployment and replication across multiple Availability or Fault Domains in OCI data centers for high availability and resilience
- Geo-redundant ordering cluster operating across multiple regions using blockchain instances deployed across different OCI regions/geographies
- On-chain fine-grained access control capability for smart contract developers to manage access permissions in their business logic based on access control lists
- An operations audit log for control plane operations to track any administrative access or configuration changes
- Enhanced rich history database support with the ability to shadow off-chain transaction updates into Oracle Database Blockchain Tables – extending auditability and tamper-proof characteristics of on-chain data to the database tables used for Analytics/BI.
- More predictable budgeting with OCPU-based pricing model and the ability to stop/restart an instance to reduce costs when the platform is not being used
- Support for BYOL pricing, which enables customers with on-premises Oracle Blockchain Platform Enterprise Edition licenses to use them instead for a cloud deployment.