Hyperledger Foundation Hyperledger Global Forum 2020, 9 Mar 2020

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From YouTube: Introducing Sextant - Duncan Johnston-Watt, Blockchain Technology Partners

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Introducing Sextant - Duncan Johnston-Watt, Blockchain Technology Partners

Founded in 2018, Blockchain Technology Partners (BTP) is a leading enterprise blockchain company. BTP brings the benefits of smart contracts and blockchain to business by providing Sextant - a management platform that radically simplifies the deployment and ongoing management of distributed applications.

Sextant for Sawtooth uses a BTP certified distribution of Hyperledger Sawtooth to deliver one-click deployment of Sawtooth networks on Kubernetes on prem, in the cloud or both.

Sextant for DAML, developed in partnership with Digital Asset, delivers one-click deployment of DAML, the leading smart contract language, on Hyperledger Sawtooth and Hyperledger Besu.

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Hyperledger – Open Source Blockchain Technologies

Hyperledger is an open source community focused on developing a suite of stable frameworks, tools and libraries for enterprise-grade blockchain deployments.
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In what little time is left after that comedy of errors, trying to actually wire myself up gonna, do a couple of things just give you a very, very brief overview of what we're doing and then show you what we're doing, which is, after all, the whole point of being here, since this is a product demo, not a product or company pitch.

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So in simple terms, we as a company are using our know-how, hard-won experience scars on our backs, call it what you will to really enable businesses to take advantage of two things: blockchain itself so DLTS and also and we'll come on to that smart contracts so provide all of the support you need around deploying and managing those platforms, those technologies so really as an enterprise you can get on with the fun stuff, the creative stuff, which is building applications.

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So first I will declare I'm a huge fan of sawtooth, so this is a great way of starting up fighting a bar by the way, especially at hyper ledger at Global Forum but yeah. We we lid on this couple years ago. In fact, if I go back to a previous life with a company called cloud, soft I was actually a member of the hype ledger community. At that time, sort of did not exist. We were one of the early members, but anyway sort is. Why do we like it?

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It's lean mean and very easy to work with compared to some of its compatriots within the hive ledger family. So what does that mean? In practical terms? It means that it's highly modular generally distributed. There has a couple of really interesting features. Consensus is something that is pluggable now do not try this at home. In other words, you know don't just arbitrarily change consensus midstream, but you can actually go through upgrading consensus, algorithms over time, so very powerful feature to have one. That, incidentally, is is governed by the network.

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So you can't just crash in and change things. The other thing is that it has this notion of first-class support for smart contract languages, starting with solidity through SAS, then web assembly and then more recently, working with digital asset. We've provided support for down and, finally, I think we can all agree. Every one of the projects has a strong governance model. So that's a feature: I tend to emphasize what I'm not at HTF, but the other thing is is: is the idea that you can scale this out?

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You can develop it over time, you're not actually obliged to bring in every single feature day one. So you can actually evolve your platform over time. So with that in mind, we have two versions of our product, which we call sextant. The reason we call it sexton is because we're members of the hate of the CNC F I'm very involved in the kubernetes community, and so they have a lot of sort of shipping analogies to Helms, tillers and so on.

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Although tillers now be deprecated with helm three, but we thought sextant, you know I want to navigate. What do I need. I need a sextant to navigate and by the way, even the astronauts still use sections to this day so to navigate the Stars. So for us, Sexton is two things. This is very much the red hat model, it's a bulletproof version of Sawtooths itself, so this is a distribution that we will build, maintain and host for you, that's not a fork. It means it's a it's a.

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We pick a version and we provide long-term support for it. We want security scans, the whole time. So what you're getting is a version that's supported and therefore, if there are issues needs to be back, fixes, I'm, sorry, but need to be addressed or features that you want back port it. Then that can be done and then there's the actual management, our platform itself, and so that's really the tools that let you that let you actually um bring new clusters into your world and then deploy things like sorties on them.

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So everything we do around deployment as I said, is, is based on kubernetes. Why? Because you can find kubernetes everywhere in any cloud, you can find it on Prem. So it's it's a it's! The logical, if you like, substrate on which to deploy and manage block chains or indeed, a whole bunch of other stuff. Besides and in fact, there are other talks here about exactly that thing, there's even a workshop on it later in the week, not necessarily on sorties, but the application of kubernetes and the learnings from that I think fabric.

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So so this is something that sort of gained a lot of a lot of traction within the community, so market texture. What you end up with is this stack, which is a hard percent open source, because that's why we're all here and then you have the management, and so this is a notion of monetizing, the management of that stacks, of bringing our know-how to bear in terms of how to actually deploy and manage things.

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How do we make that easy for people and then the distribution itself, and just as a kind of reference we're working with the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange? We have adopted sorties and have also adopted Sexton and we'll be talking about that. Some more I think it's at 250 in the afternoon, where we'll go through the Tel Aviv use, Tel Aviv, Stock Exchange use case in more detail. So let me try and demonstrate what I'm talking about so, if Microsoft PowerPoint will let me okeydoke.

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So what do we have here? So this is this is this is a cookery show, so I have already installed, saw sextant rather than try and do that, but there is excellent documentation by the way you can try this by just going on to the a Tobias marketplace.

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That's a nice way of try before you buy in terms of in terms of experimenting or you can just come and talk to us sign an NDA and will actually help set you up, as we have done with some some guys in the audience here recently, the point being that yeah, it's it's fun to have something in a marketplace: it's a shop window, but ultimately we want to work with people on this stuff.

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So there's extensive documentation describing how, in the case of Sexton four sorties, you can go through the process of actually installing sextant itself. So we're running on something called eks, which is the elastic kubernetes service. I've already done this, so I've already run thanks to Kevin and the team. What is a much more streamlined installation process than what we started with? We use how it's literally just a couple of commands. So anyway, having done that now, I'm going to switch to the getting started guide.

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Preflight checks. Have you subscribed? Yes, okay, I've logged in so the first thing I want to do, and above us is important, is you know, Sexton itself is interested in clusters, so, but what you need to do is import the information about a cluster before you can then use it as a target for deployment. So what I'm going to do is switch from documentation to real life, and here it's saying right, you've got your cluster and just to show this is real.

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I'm working with this cluster, so I'm working with s FS, test cluster, which is on US east to I, think got a few others which I probably won't have time to go through today. But but if I come back to here, the first thing you need to do is create a service I've done that the next thing you need to do is get the values. So what am I doing this, and what's this got to do with blockchain nothing, but what I'm doing is I'm querying this class that I'm getting three key pieces of information?

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Okay, so and I hope, you'll appreciate. This is easy right, I mean literally it's it's, not one click, but it's just a few simple commands so I'm going to import that information into where is it gone? Sorry.

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God I hate it when I, ok, lessons herself, it's probably a good idea to clean up before you actually try and do a demo so I'll give it a name: okay, FS test cluster. The first piece of information I pulled in was the API server. If I go back to this guy here, I'm pulling the token and I could have typed this obviously, but I think cut and paste is probably quicker so put in the access token, and then the C ace come back to here. This is bound to work by the way. Isn't it.

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So fantastic, okay, so what have I done? Haven't split the atom. What I've done is I've introduced a kubernetes cluster into the sextant environment, or why is that important? Because once you have a cluster, you can do some interesting things. So, for example, you can look at the deployments. There are no deployments. Okay, you can add a deployment, and this is where I think it is kind of cool I want to add. If anybody's actually tried installing sources, I mean it's, it's a great learning experience, but it's also quite hot.

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So we'll give this sorted, Network a unimaginative name like test Network and what am I doing here, oh well, what I'm actually doing is on providing as little information as possible because I in this case the eye is not something. It knows the ins and outs of either sorties or kubernetes, but there are a few things. I do need to provide information on which can't be determined in advance. One of those is whether the peering- and this is a technical sort of term- is going to be dynamic or static.

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The next is whether we're going to start from scratch. Ie enable Genesis block in this in this instance, and are we going to be permissioned or is the positioning I'm sorry going to be enabled or disabled affinity enabled or disabled and then were we to be adding to adding or attaching to an existing network? This is where we would actually put in the the information about that network.

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So imagine using this tool in a you know, in a consortium where you've actually got decentralized operations, so everyone has a copy of Sexton and they're each able to sort of spin up their own notes. There's needs to be some form of agreement as to how do you connect, so somebody has to see the network and then everybody else can join that network. Okay, we're not going to do that and then the other thing is, you can add custom transaction process.

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So at this point, we're not talking about demo on sorties were just talking about working with sorties and so the notion of a custom transaction process. That would be something like a process. A transaction processes have been written by quantum materials corporation so to implement one of their business processes. So this is over and above what comes out of the box with sorties as a distribution.

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Excuse me again I'm going to skip that, but I'm going to look where is it gone? I'm gonna, look for a naught from Kevin, my co-founder and CTO and say: can I just accept those defaults? No, you see I thought not. So what should I be saying here, static, I,.

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Am gonna go with pbft, though yep don't mind that do I mind that affinity, no I want it to go on so I should have said. Sorry, I should have pointed out that I'm working with a four node cluster, why anybody know pbft anybody know why four is a magic number.

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Yeah it effectively it's the lowest. This is the smallest network. You have where you can actually have a pbft consensus and have us fail at a node fail right. So there's a bunch of other questions.

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I'm gonna here accept the defaults so and I'm going to hit deploy so what's happening, so we've basically provided the the the essential information to then tell Sexton go create behind the scenes from this the manifest that needs to be applied to this cluster, and this is now we're talking kubernetes and what that's doing is it's basically and if you don't believe me, I can show you what it's doing it's now. It's now pulling down the I can have a little look.

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Something went wrong: okay, I'd love it. When a plan comes together, does refresh work, yes, see, I knew that was fine. So what you can see here is is it's happening quite quickly. Is that it's happened? Is we've pulled down from from our own docker hub, hosted a repo, the latest stable version of btp sawtooth, which is a build of sorties, and now we've deployed that on a four node cluster and I didn't even have time to jump back to my terminal window to show you the sort of classic kubernetes view of the world.

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So what's the takeaway from this we've, we've done this here with a very simple four node network, but the whole idea is is to build on this and so within a consortium back to that the magic number so to speak. It's 4, 7, 10 13, if you're, if you're implementing algorithm correctly so have somebody see the network before nodes. Have you know everyone else contributes three nodes. You pretty quickly get to the point where you're at ten, so you've got three participants where you can lose a participant and still have a network that that's that's.

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That's functioning that has that has quorum. That's really important when it comes to your a network being safe. The thing about sorties, along with many of the other deal teasers yeah. It will halt if it can't proceed and then, when you do recover, it will continue.

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But the idea here is to sort of build out a network of a sensible size where you can afford to lose a participant and still have the service or you can lose a single server in a in a three node cluster that that somebody is oak and contributing and all all three of the participants can lose a node. That's the kind of that's where this sort of the logic of building out a network of a sensible size comes in it's.

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It gives you that sort of resilience both locally, if you're, a participant and also globally across the network as a whole, so I'm I'm, pretty sure I'm pretty much out of time, if not overtime, but just as a quick, quick advert.

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If you will, we can do the same thing with something called sextant for demo, where again the same process of importing the details for one or more clusters, but from there you have the choice of demo and sawtooth demo on baizhu, which we announced earlier today, as well as demo on two non DLT solutions: amazon's Qod be centralized, ledger and even Amazon allure, which is a Postgres relational database service. So the point here, moving beyond just focusing on DLT is with something like demo.

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You can actually design the the underlying ledger based on the requirements of the use case, so I'll stop there. It's not Korean virus by the way or is it I, don't know? But you know, let's find out we're all friends here. Sorry shouldn't make jokes like that, especially not on TV, so hey Donald has a gank so bow.

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Do you know that Donald Trump is going to do the opening keynote at Hinn's next week so because he's got all the best medicine and anyway, on that note, I'll stop, and if there are any questions, please ask me I'm sure somebody's are calling security at this point.

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