Smart-Contract Based System Operations for Permissioned Blockchain

Abstract

Enterprises have paid attention to blockchain (BC), recently permissioned BC characterized with smart-contract, where busi-ness transactions among inter-authorized companies (forming consortium) can automatically be executed based on distributed consensus protocol over user-defined business logics pre-built with program codes. A single BC system will be built across mul-tiple management domains having different operational policies, e.g., datacenter of each organization; this will trigger a problem that its system operations (e.g., backup) will become time-consuming and costly due to the difficulty in unifying and/or adjusting operational policy, schedule, etc. Toward solving the problem, we propose an operations execution method for BC systems; a primary idea is to define operations as smart-contract so that unified and synchronized cross-organizational operations can be executed effectively by using BC-native features. We de-sign the proposed method as hybrid architecture including in-BC consensus establishment and out-BC event-based instruction execution, in order to be adaptable to the recent heterogeneous BC architecture. Performance evaluation using a prototype with Hyperledger Fabric v1.0 shows that the proposed method can start executing operations within 5 seconds. Furthermore, cost evaluation using model-based estimation shows that the total yearly cost of monthly operations on a 5-organizational BC sys-tem could be reduced by 61 percent compared to a conventional manual method.