Towards Continuous Deployment for Blockchain

Abstract

Ensuring a production-ready state of the application under development is the immanent feature of the continuous delivery approach. In a blockchain network, nodes communicate, storing data in a decentralized manner. Each node executes the same business application but operates in a distinct execution environment. The literature lacks research, focusing on continuous practices for blockchain and distributed ledger technology. In particular, such works with support for both software development disciplines of design and deployment. Artifacts from considered disciplines have been placed in the 1 + 5 architectural views model. The approach aims to ensure the continuous deployment of containerized blockchain distributed applications. The solution has been divided into two independent components: Delivery and deployment. They interact through Git distributed version control. Dedicated GitHub repositories should store the business application and deployment configurations for nodes. The delivery component has to ensure the deployment package in the actual version of the business application with the node-specific up-to-date version of deployment configuration files. The deployment component is responsible for providing running distributed applications in containers for all blockchain nodes. The approach uses Jenkins and Kubernetes frameworks. For the sake of verification, preliminary tests have been conducted for the Electricity Consumption and Supply Management blockchain-based system for prosumers of renewable energy.