At this point, if all went well, you should have a fully functional decentralized application, with the associated smart contracts running on Hyperledger Fabric. With this knowledge in hand, life is going to be good, right? Well, like anything, solutions evolve over time. It could be a change in regulation, the introduction of a new member in the consortium, or a simple bug in your smart contract—whatever the cause, the solution will grow, and without solid development and operational practices, changes will be slow and your life will be painful.
Considering that maintaining agility in the development processes of an IT organization is already very challenging, how can it be done in a consortium? How can companies of various cultures with different velocities come together to deliver and maintain the solution in a time frame that allows them to maintain the competitive edge that the network provides?
While a lot has already been written on the topic of IT agility and DevOps, this chapter will focus on applying some of these concepts to a blockchain network. We say some because our attention will be on those concepts that are specific/different to blockchains. Through automation and the deployment of a continuous integration and delivery (CI and CD) pipeline, we will discuss the impact that a blockchain network has on the people, the process, and the technology.
In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:
- Defining the promotion process
- Configuring the continuous integration pipeline
- Protecting the source control
- Updating the network
- Implication of the consortium on team structures