Building Private Blockchains with Amazon Managed Blockchain - Operating Hyperledger Fabric
Learn how to build a private blockchain network with Hyperledger Fabric, develop chaincode, and manage member governance.
Choosing Between Managed Blockchain and QLDB
Managed Blockchain is a managed service for Hyperledger Fabric 2.2 LTS that lets you build private blockchain networks with up to 14 members from multiple organizations. While QLDB provides an immutable ledger within a single organization, Managed Blockchain enables distributed trust across multiple organizations. It is well suited for use cases where trust must be established among participants without a central authority, such as sharing transaction histories across companies in a supply chain, sharing settlement records between financial institutions, or sharing patient consent records among healthcare providers.
Network Setup and Chaincode Development
You can create a network through the console or API by specifying the framework (Hyperledger Fabric), edition (Starter or Standard), and voting policy. When you create a member, peer nodes and a CA are automatically provisioned. Chaincode is Hyperledger Fabric's smart contract that defines business logic. It supports Fabric 2.2 LTS and can be developed in Go, Node.js, or Java. You install it on peer nodes and instantiate it on a channel. Chaincode implements transaction validation rules, data read/write logic, and access control. The recommended workflow is to test on a local Hyperledger Fabric network in your development environment, then deploy to Managed Blockchain after verification.
Governance and Operations
Managed Blockchain's vote-based governance lets network participants vote on adding or removing members. You can choose from majority, unanimous, or a specific percentage for the voting policy. Each member operates their own peer nodes and shares data through channels. Channels can consist of a subset of members, allowing you to restrict specific transactions to only the relevant parties. Peer node scaling is handled by changing the instance type to accommodate increasing transaction volumes. CloudWatch metrics let you monitor transaction commit latency and throughput to detect performance degradation early. For a comprehensive look at Hyperledger data modeling, check out technical books (Amazon).
Managed Blockchain Pricing
Managed Blockchain pricing consists of membership (network participation fee), peer nodes, and storage. Starter edition membership costs approximately $0.30 per hour (about $216/month), while Standard edition costs approximately $0.65 per hour (about $468/month). Peer nodes start at approximately $0.034 per hour (about $24/month) for bc.t3.small. Due to the nature of blockchain, network-wide costs increase as more members join, so it is important to agree on a cost-sharing model among participating organizations in advance. The Starter edition is sufficient for development and testing environments.
Summary
Managed Blockchain is a service for operating private blockchains across multiple organizations in a managed environment. It lets you delegate Hyperledger Fabric infrastructure management to AWS so you can focus on chaincode development and business logic. It is effective for use cases that require distributed trust among multiple organizations.