Hyperledger is the umbrella open source project that The Linux Foundation has created and hosted since 2015. It aims at advancing and promoting cross-industry blockchain technologies to ensure accountability, transparency, and trust among business partners. As a result, Hyperledger makes business network and transactions more efficient.
These benefits are valued by leaders across many industries, including technology, finance, healthcare, supply chain, and automotive, among several others. Hyperledger offers different blockchain platforms like Iroha, Sawtooth and Fabric.
Looking back to the last half century of computer technologies and architectures, one may observe a trend of fluctuation between the centralization and subsequent decentralization of computing power, storage, infrastructure, protocols, and code.
Mainframe computers are largely centralized. They typically house all computing power, memory, data storage, and code. Access to mainframes is mainly by ‘dumb terminals’, which only take inputs and outputs, and do not store or process data.
With the advent of personal computers and private networks, similar computational capabilities were now housed both on the clients, as well as the servers. This, in part, gave rise to the ‘client-server’ architecture, which supported the development of relational database systems. Massive data sets, which are housed on mainframes, could move onto a distributed architecture. This data could replicate from server to server, and subsets of the data could be accessed and processed on clients, and then, synced back to the server.
Over time, Internet and cloud computing architectures enabled global access from a variety of computing devices; whereas mainframes were largely designed to address the needs of large corporations and governments. Even though this ‘cloud architecture’ is decentralized in terms of hardware, it has given rise to application-level centralization (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc). Currently, we are witnessing the transition from centralized computing, storage, and processing to decentralized architectures and systems.