Hyperledger Besu Architecture Reference

Kubernetes

Nodes with Orion Transaction Manager

The following diagram shows how Besu peer nodes with Orion TM will be deployed on your Kubernetes instance.

../_images/besu-orion-node.pngFigure: Hyperledger Besu Kubernetes Deployment - Orion Peers

Notes:

  1. Pods are shown in blue in the diagram.
  2. Each peer pod will have two init-containers: certificates-init to read crypto from Vault and liveness-check to check that if the bootnode endpoint is available, only when bootnode is used.
  3. Each peer pod will then have two containers: orion and besu running. Since they are in the same pod, Kubernetes always schedules them on the same VM and they can communicate to each other through localhost. This guarantees minimal latency between them.
  4. The storage uses a Kubernetes Persistent Volume.
  5. In future releases, the levelDB PVC will be replaced by a containerised database.

Validator Nodes

The following diagram shows how Besu Validator nodes will be deployed on your Kubernetes instance.

../_images/besu-validator-node.pngFigure: Hyperledger Besu Kubernetes Deployment - Validators

Notes:

  1. Pods are shown in blue in the diagram.
  2. Each peer pod will have one init-containers: certificates-init to read crypto from Vault.
  3. Each peer pod will then have one container besu running.
  4. The storage uses a Kubernetes Persistent Volume for storing the besu data-dir.

Components

../_images/hyperledger-bevel-besu.pngFigure: Hyperledger Besu Components

Docker Images

Hyperledger Bevel uses the officially published Besu Docker images from hub.docker.com. The following Besu Images are used by Hyperledger Bevel.

  • besu - Besu Peer and Validator Node
  • orion - Orion Transaction Manager

Additionally, following common images are also used:

  • alpine-utils - Used as a utility to get crypto from Hashicorp Vault server

Ansible Playbooks

Detailed information on ansible playbooks can be referred here and the execution process can be referred here.

Helm Charts

Detailed information on helm charts can be referred here.

Vault Configuration

Hyperledger Bevel stores their crypto immediately in the Hashicorp Vault secrets engine. The crypto is stored by each organization under path secretsv2/org_namespace - it contains node keys, keystore, passwords, TM keys, and CA certificates for proxy connections. Optionally, secret_path can be set on the network.yaml to change the secret engine from the default secretsv2/.

The complete key paths in the Vault can be referred here.