In the enterprise world, organizations can be considered legal entities which manage businesses. These organizations are recognized with identities, and these identities are valid across the fabric blockchain network. Each organization defines the following entities:
- Membership services provider (MSP): Manages users, peers, and administrator identities.
- Administrator(s): Manages peers, chaincode, etc.
- Users: Initiate transactions.
- Peers: Manage endorsement and validation of transactions.
- Orderers (optional): Manager ordering of transactions.
The organization may have multiple peers, and these peers may be endorsing and committing peers or both. There are ordering services. However, setting up ordering services within an organization is optional for one or more channels. Each organization can participate in one or more channels in the blockchain network, and all this information will be captured in the network itself. It means each channel configuration is stored into the genesis block at the initial setup, or subsequent blocks, when modified, are stored into the blockchain ledger.
The network can include many organizations, and it could be a consortium. For example, a group of three banks forms a consortium, and each bank can be represented as an organization with a unique identity on the hyperledger fabric network. Each organization hosts at least one MSP for managing the identities of the entities along with the different types of users, peers and might be ordering services.
In the above diagram, there are three organizations in this consortium, and the first and the third organizations are the ones that are running peer nodes. In contrast, the second organization provides only the ordering service. So, there are various ways to set up the consortium to solve a certain business process. In this setup, first and third organizations manage two channels means two different types of blockchain services, with having a single peer at each channel and installed and initiated different chaincode for different channels. However, the ordering service is common among the channels which the second organization hosts.
References
- NPTEL lecture series on Blockchains Architecture, Design and Use Cases by Prof. Sandip Chakraborty, IIT Kharagpur.
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