Oracle updates Blockchain Platform Cloud Service

Oracle has spruced up its Blockchain Platform Cloud Service with new capabilities drawn from Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Hyperledger Fabric.

According to Oracle, the new release reflects customers' growing needs for resilience and high availability, scale-up and scale-out to handle growing workloads.

Oracle's group VP of blockchain product development, Frank Xiong, says the Oracle Blockchain Platform aims to bring 'a new level' of deployment for organisations that have enterprise blockchain applications running on Oracle Cloud infrastructure.

"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.

Blockchain Platform Cloud Service features stronger access controls for sharing confidential information, greater decentralisation capabilities for blockchain consortiums, and stronger audibility when rich history database feature is used in conjunction with Oracle Database Blockchain Tables.

The company states that organisations with business-critical blockchain applications will benefit most from the update. The update can help organisations deploy  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 components in the new instances to quickly extend their cloud resources and equips them to handle the increased workloads," the company states.

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

Oracle outlines further updates to Oracle Blockchain Platform Cloud Service:

• 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 high availability and 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 the 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 BYOL pricing, which enables customers with on-premises Oracle Blockchain Platform Enterprise Edition licenses to use them instead for a cloud deployment.