Hyperledger Fabric Certifications and Career Choices
Many people start learning blockchain and wish to re-invent their career as Hyperledger professionals; however, they may run into a cross-road on whether become a Hyperledger system admin or developer. Thus, this article is to shed more lights on Hyperledger career tracks.
To start-off, we review Hyperledger Fabric (HF) key features, followed by briefly reviewing its components. Then, we break down its components into two career paths: a- HF system administrator and b- HF developer.
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Hyperledger Fabric Highlights
Here are main features that set HF apart from the other distributed ledger technologies:
- Permissioned architecture
- Highly modular
- Pluggable consensus
- Open smart contract model — flexibility to implement any desired solution model (account model, unspent transaction output model, structured data, unstructured data, etc)
- Low latency of finality/confirmation
- Flexible approach to data privacy : data isolation using ‘channels’, or share private data on a need to-know basis using private data ‘collections’
- Multi-language smart contract support: Go, Java, JavaScript
- Support for Ethereum Virtual Machine and Solidity
- Designed for continuous operations, including rolling upgrades and asymmetric version sup-port
- Governance and versioning of smart contracts
- Flexible endorsement model for achieving consensus across required organizations
- Queryable data (key-based queries and JSON queries)
In addition to above features, the Hyperledger Fabric takes pride in its growing community. There are many projects, libraries and tools under the Hyperledger family, many of which are at the incubation stage while being maintained by its active community. The dedication of Hyperledger community to Hyperledger’s constant improvement in the security, usability, robustness, performance and feature set is another prominent factor for its success and adoption. Lastly, to the best of our knowledge, there are no other distributed ledger technology frameworks beside Hyperledger that enjoy the breadth of adoption by Cloud Service Providers such as AWS, Azure, IBM, Google, and Oracle.
Hyperledger Fabric Components
Here is the list of major HF components
- Blockchain network
- Identity
- Membership Service Provider (MSP)
- Policies
- Peers
- Smart Contracts and Chaincode
- Ledger
- The Ordering Service
Hyperledger Fabric for System Administration
To pursue a career as a HF system administrator, a good knowledge of HF network and its parts is required. Specifically, you need to know how to administer and interact with chaincode, manage peers, and operate basic CA-level functions. Being a HF system admin entails a good understanding of the HF network topology, chaincode operations, administration of identities, permissions, how and where to configure component logging, and much more. As a rule of thumb, to become a professional HF system admin, you need to have a solid foundation from the following 5 topics:
- Application Lifecycle Management
- Install and Configure Network
- Diagnostics and Troubleshooting including logs
- Membership Service Provider
- Network Maintenance and Operations
Taking Certified Hyperledger Fabric Administrator (CHFA) certification exam by The Linux Foundation is recommended for validating and accrediting your expertise. However, as with other skills, hands-on experience in creating and managing networks may amount to if not exceed the CHFA certification.
From technical standpoint, to become a professional HF system admin, one should acquire a basic knowledge of the Linux command line, bash, Docker and containers (like Kubernetes), NoSQL, CouchDB, and blockchain and distributed ledgers.
Here is a great follow-up article for those interested in learning more about Hyperledger Fabric System Administration.
Hyperledger Fabric for Application Development
In comparison with system administration, HF developers’ primary task is to work on one major component of HF which is smart contract or chaincode. In short, developers are required to design, develop, test and deploy HF chaincodes on the peer. In doing so, they may need to know the basic of network configuration and coordinate with system admins. The following are some typical tasks that are performed by developers while developing smart contracts:
- Define transaction functions
- Execute simple queries
- Create complex queries
- Define assets using key value pairs
- Identify potentially private data
- Incorporate private data collection
- Submit, evaluate, and query transaction by invoking the smart contracts
At a high level, as a HF developer, you should demonstrate your ability to package and deploy Fabric applications and smart contracts, perform end-to-end Fabric application life-cycle and smart contract management, program in Java or Node.js (or Go for smart contracts) and more.
Unlike HF system admin, HF developers must have a solid foundation or background in one of the following programming languages: JavaScript, Java, Go, or Python. The most famous JS framework that is currently used by Fabric developers is Node.JS.
At last, similar to CHFA, The Linux Foundation offers Certified Hyperledger Fabric Developer certification exam. Like before actions speak louder than words meaning your prior development experiences in Fabric may outperform CHFA.
Summary
By now you understand that there are two major ways in which you can re-invent your career when it comes to Hyperledger Fabric. Each path may have some derivatives. For examples, as Hyperledger system admin, you can become a Blockchain Consultant or Hyperledger Specialist. Likewise, as a HF developer you can become Hyperledger Cloud Engineer or Hyperledger Fullstack Engineer. If you like to learn more about each career path and launch your journey, you can start by taking the below self-paced classes.
· Blockchain Management in Hyperledger for System Admins
· Hyperledger Fabric for Developers