Announcing the Next Generation of Oracle Blockchain Platform Cloud Service

Oracle is announcing a significant update to the Oracle Blockchain Platform Cloud Service, leveraging the advantages of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and new advancements by the Hyperledger community in Hyperledger Fabric. 

Oracle Blockchain customers are increasingly moving their applications into production, and existing production customers are scaling up their deployments and ramping up their transaction volumes. This new release responds to their needs with increased resilience and even higher availability, dynamic scale-up and scale-out to handle ever growing workloads, stronger access controls for sharing confidential information, superior price/performance, greater decentralization capabilities for Blockchain Consortiums, and stronger auditability when rich history database feature is used in conjunction with Oracle Database Blockchain Tables. 

Benefits of the new Oracle Blockchain Platform Cloud Service Release

With this release, the transaction-based pricing model is changing to an OCPU-hour plus storage metric, which helps customers with high transaction volumes to achieve lower cost and more predictable pricing based on their processing and storage configuration – rather than difficult-to-predict transaction volumes.

Customers with business-critical blockchain applications benefit from this new release’s ability to automatically deploy its components across three Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Availability Domains (and in the regions with a single Availability Domain, three Fault Domains) to provide stronger resilience and recoverability, with the SLA for the Enterprise SKUs of at least 99.95%. As customer workloads grow, this release enables them to dynamically scale up and scale out the new instances to quickly extend their cloud resources and equips them to handle the increased workloads.  

This release also offers a new blockchain consensus mechanism based on RAFT protocol, which supports greater decentralization for business networks and enables multiple participants to run and contribute orderer nodes to the network for more shared governance.

Peter Merkert, co-founder of retraced has been using the new Oracle Blockchain Cloud Service Platform and has praise for the new features within the release, specifically the dynamic scaling. "The dynamic scaling is extremely important for us, because we can allow running full throttle massive engines when we need them, but cut costs when they are not required," notes Peter Merkert of retraced.  Award-winning German start-up retraced is using Oracle Blockchain Platform Cloud Service for tracking sustainable fashion supply chains. 

“With this release, Oracle advances the Oracle Blockchain Platform Cloud Service to a new level of dynamic scalability, high availability, and quick deployment for enterprise blockchain applications running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure,” said Frank Xiong, Group Group VP, Blockchain Product Development, Oracle. “It’s designed and developed to meet our customers’ growing demand for a more resilient, secure, and scalable platform that’s ready for growing workloads of enterprise blockchain applications in numerous use cases across various industries.” 

Enhancements in this release include:
•    The ability to choose between development-oriented Standard SKU and production-grade Enterprise SKU, which provides multiple shapes, high availability, and supports dynamic scalability
•    On-demand storage capacity, which customers can add to an instance when needed
•    Automatic deployment and replication across multiple availability or fault domains in OCI data centers for even higher availability and greater resilience
•    Geo-redundant ordering cluster operating across multiple regions using blockchain instances deployed across different OCI regions/geographies 
•    On-chain fine-grained access control capability for smart contract developers to manage access permissions in their business logic based on access control lists
•    An operations audit log for control plane operations to track any administrative access or configuration changes
•    Enhanced rich history database support with ability to shadow off-chain transaction updates into Oracle Database Blockchain Tables - extending auditability and tamper-proof characteristics of on-chain data to the database tables used for Analytics/BI.
•    More predictable budgeting with OCPU-based pricing model and the ability to stop/restart an instance to reduce costs when the platform is not being used
•    Support for "bring your own license/ BYOL pricing", which enables customers with on-premises Oracle Blockchain Platform Enterprise Edition licenses to use them instead for a cloud deployment.

For customers using current versions of Oracle Blockchain Platform Cloud Service, Oracle will provide a migration capability to the new release with no loss of ledger data or configuration information.

For more information on the release, please visit the Oracle Blockchain Platform Cloud Service documentation page.

For technical details on the release features, visit the blog post Advancing Enterprise Blockchain with the Latest Generation of Oracle Blockchain Platform.