What kind of consensus used in Hyperledger Fabric?

Question

I don't know if this question make sense, I know Raft is consensus algorithm and use etcd to distributed the data, and i know etcd in Raft Ordering Service have a similar job with zookeeper in Kafka Ordering Service, but what I don't understand is, what kind of consensus used in Kafka ordering service?

Right now ordering service can use Raft or Kafka (deprecated), but Raft is a consensus algorithm yet Kafka is not. Or actually both of them just part of the consensus ordering phase? then does that mean now Fabric uses consensus algorithm to be part of consensus??? then what kind of consensus used in Fabric? I've read somewhere Fabric is not PBFT yet.

Answer 1

Let's talk about it as ordering and consensus and bring in Kafka and Raft.

In a distributed system, where messages are going to multiple nodes, the said nodes need a way to know which message came first, which was second, etc. Think of it as transactions on your bank account. If you have $20 in your account and someone pays you $30 so your account goes to $50, and you pay me $50 and your account goes to $0, its a valid sequence. But if your bank messes the order and you start with $20 and the transfer to me for $50 comes next, that check is going to bounce.

So that sequence (also known as order) is important, and in Fabric this is done by The Order Node.

For redundancy, to mitigate malicious intent, for decentralization and other reasons, you may not want just one node providing order. But, if you have n ordering nodes, how do you make sure they come up with one order of messages and not n variations of that order? You get a consensus among those nodes on the order of those messages. As one of the responders posted - you can achieve that consensus with RAFT or Kafka. Both are Crash Fault Tolerant (CFT) consensus algorithms, which means theoretically as long as majority of the ordering nodes are good, (2 out of 3, or 3 out of 5, etc) you are in good shape.

You are correct and RAFT does use etcd, but I think that's an implementation detail and not tied to the consensus conceptually. Etcd is an open source key-value store used to hold and manage information that distributed systems need to keep running. Its used by RAFT in Fabric, but it's also used by other projects like I think kubernetes uses it to manage all the configuration and metadata, etc

I am not aware of a Byzantine Fault tolerant library (where 2/3rd or fewer ordering nodes can be faulty I think and the system would still function) being available for Hyperledger Fabric yet, although there have been and continue to be discussions on it and the Fabric documentation states that RAFT CFT is a stepping stone to a BFT consensus library for Fabric in the future.

I would also reiterate reviewing the link to The Ordering Service Docs that was posted by another poster as good material to review for more information.

I also really like this introduction to RAFT video, it's not related to Fabric, but does an excellent job of explaining RAFT in general, if you are interested.

Answer 2

I am not an expert on the subject , but I will try to respond to your questions.

Apache ZooKeeper (used in Kafka) , does not use a consensus algorithm , it is a centralized service that save configuration and expose endpoints (https://zookeeper.apache.org/) , so Zookeeper is used as a central communication point and it use Zab to propagate state update. If you want more info , go here : https://kafka.apache.org/intro

Now Fabric use etcd to maintain the state of the world state , etcd use Raft wich is Leader/Follower type consensus algorithm.

So Raft is the consensus used in HyperLedger Fabric as 2.x , but as it is a Leader/Follower type algorithm , it is not Byzantine Fault Tolerant (at is core , modification can be made to make it PBFT).

I recommend you read the Hyperledger documentation which is very complete , and probably explain better than me: https://hyperledger-fabric.readthedocs.io/en/release-2.2/orderer/ordering_service.html

Also , the RAFT documentation if you want to understand how the algorithm work : https://raft.github.io/

Answer 3

In its entirety, a consensus in the blockchain is a mechanism that ensures all copies of a distributed ledger are the same.

Hyperledger Fabric achieves consensus by relying on a backend service (known as the ordering service) that intermediates the messages between senders and receivers. This backend service will ensure that all receivers will see messages in the same order – it follows that if all receivers see messages in the same order(prior to version 1.4, used Kafka, and later RAFT), they will perform the same actions/commits, etc. and the consensus is achieved.

Hyperledger Fabric uses Crash Fault Tolerance(CFT) to achieve consensus for single as well as multiple org systems. Crash Fault Tolerant model guaranties to withstand system failures, such as crashes, network partitioning. Having N nodes in your consensus system CFT capable to withstand up to N/2 such crashes.

For more information, you can read this article which does a good job on explaining consensus in Hyperledger Fabric.