A peer is an entity that participates in a Hyperledger Fabric network. Its identity is determined from its corresponding membership service provider. A peer is responsible for deploying and instantiating chaincode, updating the ledger, interacting with other peers to share private data associated with transactions, and interacting with the ordering service as well as smart contracts (chain code, in the preceding screenshot) that it runs. Similar to Fabric CA, a peer also typically runs inside a Docker container.