Hyperledger Fabric Network Expand with External Organization

Question

Lets say we have a network with 3 organizations that are already joined and make transactions within a channel. All 3 are under the same server.

A new organization needs to join the channel and the network, but wants to use its own infrastructure. And the devs or administrators of the current working network should not have access to the new one. What are the most important files that should by the administrators shared to the new organizations "developers" so they can join their company?

I have read tutorials and the documentation on how the process goes, but I see that a lot of detailed processes need to take place, like getting the config_block and edit it by the administrators with the new orgs info.

What are some vital parts and "best" practices, lets say, to do such an operation?

Thank you

Answer 1

As I don't have a high enough reputation to comment, I am going to give advice as an answer to your question.

If you are implementing Hyperledger through docker containers, then you can nearly solve this problem yourself. My advice is to first learn what it takes to add a new organisation (peer) to an existing channel. This is well documented in the Hyperledger documentation. Once you can do this, then if I understand you correctly, you want to be able to repeat the same operation as if the docker container (peer) exists on a completely different server. Now you need to be able to complete the same operation while having the peer exist on a different domain. To do this, you will need to have the files and directory structures available that allowed the new container to be built. Your main problems now are opening ports, dealing with IP addresses, domains and all that other lovely networking stuff.

The Add Org3 tutorial provides a lot of good information on how to add a new peer. It doesn't create a Certificate Authority peer, but you can overcome this by doing a few small changes to the scripts. You will have to change the organisation names anyway to make it work for your situation.

If you learn to do it locally first, by then you will have enough knowledge to extract the bits to make it work from a remote server.