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Deploy Fabric Network using Operator

Introduction

The bevel-operator-fabric provides a different approach to deploying the Fabric Network. It uses the kubernetes operator to deploy CAs, Orderers and Peers. This release supports bevel-operator-fabric version 1.9.0 and all the Fabric platforms supported by it. Also, chaincode and user/certificate management is not yet supported, there will be separate issues to handle this. Current implementation supports till Channel creation and joining.

Due to open issues with bevel-operator-fabric, it is not recommended for Production workloads yet.

NOTE: The bevel-operator-fabric deployment has been tested only for Fabric 2.5.3

Modifying Configuration File

A Sample configuration file for deploying using bevel-operator-fabric is available here. Following are the main changes in this file from previous versions:

  1. network.env.type must be operator. This is how Ansible will understand that bevel-operator-fabric will be used.
  2. network.env.proxy must be istio as no other proxy is supported by bevel-operator-fabric.
  3. Only 443 is supported as external port because that is what bevel-operator-fabric supports.
  4. vault and gitops sections are removed as they are not applicable.

For generic instructions on the Fabric configuration file, refer this guide.

Run playbook

After all the configurations are updated in the network.yaml, execute the following to create the DLT network 

# Run the provisioning scripts
ansible-playbook platforms/shared/configuration/site.yaml -e "@./build/network.yaml"
The site.yaml playbook, in turn calls various playbooks depending on the configuration file and sets up your DLT/Blockchain network.

The deploy-fabric-console.yaml playbook can be used as well if the pre-requisites like Istio and krew is already installed. This can be done using the following command

ansible-playbook platforms/hyperledger-fabric/configuration/deploy-operator-network.yaml -e "@/path/to/network.yaml"

Refer to bevel-operator-fabric docs for details the operator and latest releases.