Quorum Architecture Reference

Kubernetes

Nodes with Tessera

The following diagram shows how Quorum peer nodes with Tessera TM will be deployed on your Kubernetes instance.

Figure: Quorum Kubernetes Deployment - Tessera Peers

Notes:

Pods are shown in blue in the diagram.
Each peer pod will have three init-containers: certificates-init to read crypto from Vault, mysql-init to initialize MySQL DB and quorum-genesis-init-container to generate genesis block.
Each peer pod will then have three containers: mysql-db, tessera and quorum containers running. Since they are in the same pod, Kubernetes always schedules them on the same VM and they can communicate to each other through localhost. This guarantees minimal latency between them.
The storage uses a Kubernetes Persistent Volume.

Components

Figure: Quorum Components

Docker Images

Hyperledger Bevel uses the officially published Quorum Docker images from hub.docker.com. The following Quorum Images are used by Hyperledger Bevel.

quorum - Quorum Peer Node
tessera - Tessera Transaction Manager

Additionnally, following common images are also used:

busybox - Used for DB initialtization
mysql-server - Used as the DB for Tessera Transaction Manager
alpine-utils - Used as a utility to get crypto from Hashicorp Vault server

Ansible Playbooks

Detailed information on ansible playbooks can be referred here and the execution process can be referred here.

Helm Charts

Detailed information on helm charts can be referred here.

Vault Configuration

Hyperledger Bevel stores their crypto immediately in the Hashicorp Vault secrets engine. The crypto is stored by each organization under path secretsv2/org_namespace - it contains node keys, keystore, passwords, TM keys, and CA certificates for proxy connections. Optionally, secret_path can be set on the network.yaml to change the secret engine from the default secretsv2/.

The complete key paths in the Vault can be referred here.