Blockchain Demo

Table of Contents

1. Outline
2. How to run
3. Components
   • Transaction Spawners
   • Transaction Pool
   • Miners
   • Blockchain Supervisor
   • Models
4. Architecture
   • Building Block View
   • Runtime View
   • Deployment View

Outline

This project creates a blockchain scenario utilizing multiple microservices which are orchestrated via Kubernetes.

It serves as an educational project in order to:

• dive into Go
• learn how TDD works with Go
• become familiar with GitHub & GitHub Actions (the author's a GitLab-guy...)
• increase the author's practical experience with Kubernetes
• understand Blockchain-mechanisms
• evaluate some CNCF graduated & incubating projects like Prometheus, NATS, Jaeger, Flux, ...

Disclaimer:

This project does not claim any correctness regarding topics such as Blockchain, etc.

How to run

The easiest way tu run this project is via k3d

# Create k3s cluster
./k8s/create_cluster.sh
kubectl config use-context k3d-mycluster

# Start
kubectl apply -k ./k8s/

# Teardown
kubectl delete -k ./k8s/

Components

This Project will consist of the following components:

Component	Repository	Status
Transaction Spawner	philohsophy/transaction-spawner
Transaction Pool	philohsophy/transaction-pool
Miners	philohsophy/blockchain-miner
Blockchain Supervisor	philohsophy/blockchain-supervisor
Models	philohsophy/blockchain-models

Additionally the following external services will be used:

Service	Usage	Added?
Grafana	Visualization of Blockchain metrics	Yes
Prometheus	Monitoring of metrics, i.e.: - amount of transactions waiting to be processed - min/max/avg processing time for transactions - running miner-instances	In Process
NATS	Async communication between components	No
fluentd	Logging	No
Jaeger	Tracing	No

Transaction Spawners

Clients for spawning transactions.

Transaction Pool

When users create transactions and submit them to the network, they are inserted into a pool. Miners can pick transactions from this pool and include them in a block.

Miners

Can use different forms of consensus algorithms, like:

• Proof of work
• Proof of stake
• Proof of activity
• ...

Blockchain Supervisor

• Sets difficulty+Consensus
• Reviews proof-of-work
• Manages Blockchain (inserts new found blocks)
• Provides information about current Block (hash+id)
• Notifies Miners when a new valid Block has been found and accepted

Models

Repository with shared data models used by all services:

• Transaction
• Block

Also provides convinience functions like schema-validation for each model

Architecture

Hint: Use dark-mode (Profile → Settings → Appearance → "Default dark" / "Dark dimmed")

Building Block View

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Runtime View

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Deployment View

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TODO