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Add high-throughput example to samples
A new data storage model was implemented in the fabric-samples which allows for high-throughput of transactions. The storage model is based on storing deltas of a value, creating a new row for each transaction, and then merging these deltas when the final value of the variable is required. This concept is similar to simple integer-based CRDTs, where add or subtract updates are constantly sent to the ledger and the merge function combines all of these deltas into one value. Change-Id: I60b5cdc295d4503d7d496d016bf215c78eff5710 Signed-off-by: Alexandre Pauwels <alexj.pauwels@gmail.com>
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# High-Throughput Network | ||
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## Purpose | ||
This network is used to understand how to properly design the chaincode data model when handling thousands of transactions per second which all | ||
update the same asset in the ledger. A naive implementation would use a single key to represent the data for the asset, and the chaincode would | ||
then attempt to update this key every time a transaction involving it comes in. However, when many transactions all come in at once, in the time | ||
between when the transaction is simulated on the peer (i.e. read-set is created) and it's ready to be committed to the ledger, another transaction | ||
may have already updated the same value. Thus, in the simple implementation, the read-set version will no longer match the version in the orderer, | ||
and a large number of parallel transactions will fail. To solve this issue, the frequently updated value is instead stored as a series of deltas | ||
which are aggregated when the value must be retrieved. In this way, no single row is frequently read and updated, but rather a collection of rows | ||
is considered. | ||
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## Use Case | ||
The primary use case for this chaincode data model design is for applications in which a particular asset has an associated amount that is | ||
frequently added to or removed from. For example, with a bank or credit card account, money is either paid to or paid out of it, and the amount | ||
of money in the account is the result of all of these additions and subtractions aggregated together. A typical person's bank account may not be | ||
used frequently enough to require highly-parallel throughput, but an organizational account used to store the money collected from customers on an | ||
e-commerce platform may very well receive a very high number of transactions from all over the world all at once. In fact, this use case is the only | ||
use case for cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin: a user's unspent transaction output (UTXO) is the result of all transactions he or she has been a part of | ||
since joining the blockchain. Other use cases that can employ this technique might be IOT sensors which frequently update their sensed value in the | ||
cloud. | ||
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By adopting this method of storing data, an organization can optimize their chaincode to store and record transactions as quickly as possible and can | ||
aggregate ledger records into one value at the time of their choosing without sacrificing transaction performance. Given the state-machine design of | ||
Hyperledger Fabric, however, careful considerations need to be given to the data model design for the chaincode. | ||
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Let's look at some concrete use cases and how an organization might implement high-throughput storage. These cases will try and explore some of the | ||
advantages and disadvantages of such a system, and how to overcome them. | ||
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#### Example 1 (IOT): Boxer Construction Analysts | ||
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Boxer Construction Analysts is an IOT company focused on enabling real-time monitoring of large, expensive assets (machinery) on commercial | ||
construction projects. They've partnered with the only construction vehicle company in New York, Condor Machines Inc., to provide a reliable, | ||
auditable, and replayable monitoring system on their machines. This allows Condor to monitor their machines and address problems as soon as | ||
they occur while providing end-users with a transparent report on machine health, which helps keep the customers satisfied. | ||
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The vehicles are outfitted with many sensors each of which broadcasts updated values at frequencies ranging from several times a second to | ||
several times a minute. Boxer initially sets up their chaincode so that the central machine computer pushes these values out to the blockchain | ||
as soon as they're produced, and each sensor has its own row in the ledger which is updated when a new value comes in. While they find that | ||
this works fine for the sensors which only update several times a minute, they run into some issues when updating the faster sensors. Often, | ||
the blockchain skips several sensor readings before adding a new one, defeating the purpose of having a fast, always-on sensor. The issue they're | ||
running into is that they're sending update transactions so fast that the version of the row is changed between the creation of a transaction's | ||
read-set and committing that transaction to the ledger. The result is that while a transaction is in the process of being committed, all future | ||
transactions are rejected until the commitment process is complete and a new, much later reading updates the ledger. | ||
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To address this issue, they adopt a high-throughput design for the chaincode data model instead. Each sensor has a key which identifies it within the | ||
ledger, and the difference between the previous reading and the current reading is published as a transaction. For example, if a sensor is monitoring | ||
engine temperature, rather than sending the following list: 220F, 223F, 233F, 227F, the sensor would send: +220, +3, +10, -6 (the sensor is assumed | ||
to start a 0 on initialization). This solves the throughput problem, as the machine can post delta transactions as fast as it wants and they will all | ||
eventually be committed to the ledger in the order they were received. Additionally, these transactions can be processed as they appear in the ledger | ||
by a dashboard to provide live monitoring data. The only difference the engineers have to pay attention to in this case is to make sure the sensors can | ||
send deltas from the previous reading, rather than fixed readings. | ||
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#### Example 2 (Balance Transfer): Robinson Credit Co. | ||
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Robinson Credit Co. provides credit and financial services to large businesses. As such, their accounts are large, complex, and accessed by many | ||
people at once at any time of the day. They want to switch to blockchain, but are having trouble keeping up with the number of deposits and | ||
withdrawals happening at once on the same account. Additionally, they need to ensure users never withdraw more money than is available | ||
on an account, and transactions that do get rejected. The first problem is easy to solve, the second is more nuanced and requires a variety of | ||
strategies to accommodate high-throughput storage model design. | ||
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To solve throughput, this new storage model is leveraged to allow every user performing transactions against the account to make that transaction in terms | ||
of a delta. For example, global e-commerce company America Inc. must be able to accept thousands of transactions an hour in order to keep up with | ||
their customer's demands. Rather than attempt to update a single row with the total amount of money in America Inc's account, Robinson Credit Co. | ||
accepts each transaction as an additive delta to America Inc's account. At the end of the day, America Inc's accounting department can quickly | ||
retrieve the total value in the account when the sums are aggregated. | ||
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However, what happens when American Inc. now wants to pay its suppliers out of the same account, or a different account also on the blockchain? | ||
Robinson Credit Co. would like to be assured that America Inc.'s accounting department can't simply overdraw their account, which is difficult to | ||
do while at the same enabling transactions to happen quickly, as deltas are added to the ledger without any sort of bounds checking on the final | ||
aggregate value. There are a variety of solutions which can be used in combination to address this. | ||
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Solution 1 involves polling the aggregate value regularly. This happens separate from any delta transaction, and can be performed by a monitoring | ||
service setup by Robinson themselves so that they can at least be guaranteed that if an overdraw does occur, they can detect it within a known | ||
number of seconds and respond to it appropriately (e.g. by temporarily shutting off transactions on that account), all of which can be automated. | ||
Furthermore, thanks to the decentralized nature of Fabric, this operation can be performed on a peer dedicated to this function that would not | ||
slow down or impact the performance of peers processing customer transactions. | ||
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Solution 2 involves breaking up the submission and verification steps of the balance transfer. Balance transfer submissions happen very quickly | ||
and don't bother with checking overdrawing. However, a secondary process reviews each transaction sent to the chain and keeps a running total, | ||
verifying that none of them overdraw the account, or at the very least that aggregated withdrawals vs deposits balance out at the end of the day. | ||
Similar to Solution 1, this system would run separate from any transaction processing hardware and would not incur a performance hit on the | ||
customer-facing chain. | ||
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Solution 3 involves individually tailoring the smart contracts between Robinson and America Inc, leveraging the power of chaincode to customize | ||
spending limits based on solvency proofs. Perhaps a limit is set on withdrawal transactions such that anything below \$1000 is automatically processed | ||
and assumed to be correct and at minimal risk to either company simply due to America Inc. having proved solvency. However, withdrawals above \$1000 | ||
must be verified before approval and admittance to the chain. | ||
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## How | ||
This sample provides the chaincode and scripts required to run a high-throughput application. For ease of use, it runs on the same network which is brought | ||
up by `byfn.sh` in the `first-network` folder within `fabric-samples`, albeit with a few small modifications. The instructions to build the network | ||
and run some invocations are provided below. | ||
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### Build your network | ||
1. `cd` into the `first-network` folder within `fabric-samples`, e.g. `cd ~/fabric-samples/first-network` | ||
2. Open `docker-compose-cli.yaml` in your favorite editor, and edit the following lines: | ||
* In the `volumes` section of the `cli` container, edit the second line which refers to the chaincode folder to point to the chaincode folder | ||
within the `high-throughput` folder, e.g. | ||
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`./../chaincode/:/opt/gopath/src/github.com/hyperledger/fabric/examples/chaincode/go` --> | ||
`./../high-throughput/chaincode/:/opt/gopath/src/github.com/hyperledger/fabric/examples/chaincode/go` | ||
* Again in the `volumes` section, edit the fourth line which refers to the scripts folder so it points to the scripts folder within the | ||
`high-throughput` folder, e.g. | ||
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`./scripts:/opt/gopath/src/github.com/hyperledger/fabric/peer/scripts/` --> | ||
`./../high-throughput/scripts/:/opt/gopath/src/github.com/hyperledger/fabric/peer/scripts/` | ||
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* Finally, comment out the `command` section by placing a `#` before it, e.g. | ||
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`#command: /bin/bash -c './scripts/script.sh ${CHANNEL_NAME}; sleep $TIMEOUT'` | ||
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3. We can now bring our network up by typing in `./byfn.sh -m up -c mychannel` | ||
4. Open a new terminal window and enter the CLI container using `docker exec -it cli bash`, all operations on the network will happen within | ||
this container from now on. | ||
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### Install and instantiate the chaincode | ||
1. Once you're in the CLI container run `cd scripts` to enter the `scripts` folder | ||
2. Set-up the environment variables by running `source setclienv.sh` | ||
3. Set-up your channels and anchor peers by running `./channel-setup.sh` | ||
4. Install your chaincode by running `./install-chaincode.sh 1.0`. The only argument is a number representing the chaincode version, every time | ||
you want to install and upgrade to a new chaincode version simply increment this value by 1 when running the command, e.g. `./install-chaincode.sh 2.0` | ||
5. Instantiate your chaincode by running `./instantiate-chaincode.sh 1.0`. The version argument serves the same purpose as in `./install-chaincode.sh 1.0` | ||
and should match the version of the chaincode you just installed. In the future, when upgrading the chaincode to a newer version, | ||
`./upgrade-chaincode.sh 2.0` should be used instead of `./instantiate-chaincode.sh 1.0`. | ||
6. Your chaincode is now installed and ready to receive invocations | ||
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### Invoke the chaincode | ||
All invocations are provided as scripts in `scripts` folder; these are detailed below. | ||
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#### Update | ||
The format for update is: `./update-invoke.sh name value operation` where `name` is the name of the variable to update, `value` is the value to | ||
add to the variable, and `operation` is either `+` or `-` depending on what type of operation you'd like to add to the variable. In the future, | ||
multiply/divide operations will be supported (or add them yourself to the chaincode as an exercise!) | ||
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Example: `./update-invoke.sh myvar 100 +` | ||
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#### Get | ||
The format for get is: `./get-invoke.sh name` where `name` is the name of the variable to get. | ||
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Example: `./get-invoke.sh myvar` | ||
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#### Delete | ||
The format for delete is: `./delete-invoke.sh name` where `name` is the name of the variable to delete. | ||
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Example: `./delete-invoke.sh myvar` | ||
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#### Prune | ||
Pruning takes all the deltas generated for a variable and combines them all into a single row, deleting all previous rows. This helps cleanup | ||
the ledger when many updates have been performed. There are two types of pruning: `prunefast` and `prunesafe`. Prune fast performs the deletion | ||
and aggregation simultaneously, so if an error happens along the way data integrity is not guaranteed. Prune safe performs the aggregation first, | ||
backs up the results, then performs the deletion. This way, if an error occurs along the way, data integrity is maintained. | ||
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The format for pruning is: `./[prunesafe|prunefast]-invoke.sh name` where `name` is the name of the variable to prune. | ||
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Example: `./prunefast-invoke.sh myvar` or `./prunesafe-invoke.sh myvar` | ||
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### Test the Network | ||
Two scripts are provided to show the advantage of using this system when running many parallel transactions at once: `many-updates.sh` and | ||
`many-updates-traditional.sh`. The first script accepts the same arguments as `update-invoke.sh` but duplicates the invocation 1000 times | ||
and in parallel. The final value, therefore, should be the given update value * 1000. Run this script to confirm that your network is functioning | ||
properly. You can confirm this by checking your peer and orderer logs and verifying that no invocations are rejected due to improper versions. | ||
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The second script, `many-updates-traditional.sh`, also sends 1000 transactions but using the traditional storage system. It'll update a single | ||
row in the ledger 1000 times, with a value incrementing by one each time (i.e. the first invocation sets it to 0 and the last to 1000). The | ||
expectation would be that the final value of the row is 999. However, the final value changes each time this script is run and you'll find | ||
errors in the peer and orderer logs. | ||
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There is one other script, `get-traditional.sh`, which simply gets the value of a row in the traditional way, with no deltas. | ||
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Examples: | ||
`./many-updates.sh testvar 100 +` --> final value from `./get-invoke.sh` should be 100000 | ||
`./many-updates-traditional.sh testvar` --> final value from `./get-traditional.sh testvar` is undefined |
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hello, I have a question: You just add a back-up int the pruneSafe function compare with the pruneFast function, why need this? In Fabric1.0, if you put/delete a key/value in the chaincode, it just put in the rwset, you'll not change the state, so I think no need a back-up. Or you have one reason?