What is a peer in IBM Bluemix blockchain? - ibm-cloud

I am working on IBM Bluemix Blockchain. I realized that IBM only offers 4 peers for a very expensive package (see attached image). Tried to read through glossaries and key terms but still got confused. I suppose that it is not relevant to peer concept in p2p network. Wish someone here can help me to answer my question.

The peers in the IBM Bluemix Blockchain offering are 4 peers on a peer-to-peer network. They are included in the free Blockchain starter developer plan, as well as the High-Security Business Network plan that you reference. See the Blockchain entry in the Bluemix Catalog.
As this question is not about programming, there is a good chance it will be voted down or removed. See What topics can I ask about here? You can ask questions about the Bluemix offerings at IBM developerWorks Answers.

IBM Bluemix Blockchain is a hosted version of Hyperledger fabric. (Both versions 0.6 and 1.0 alpha are supported; the latter only as a free "preview".) Consequently, you should check out the fabric documentation. Your question is answered by the project Glossary: a peer is "A network entity that maintains a ledger and runs chaincode containers in order to perform read/write operations to the ledger. Peers are owned and maintained by members." Hyperledger fabric documentation - Glossary
And I agree that this is not a good question here.

Related

How to integrate Watson IOT service to Hyperledger Fabric?

Due to IBM doesn't provide free plan for IBM Blockchain anymore, I come up with with solution to integrate Watson IOT to Hyperledger Fabric instead of IBM Blockchain.
I found this document, it say that Watson IoT Platform blockchain integration supports connecting to both IBM Blockchain fabrics and Hyperledger fabrics
(in section Config Blockchain IBM environment)
But I can not find any guideline.
Anyone can help?
I have several related comments:
1) The page you linked to shows an early version of the IoT Contract Platform that I authored. I have not been funded to port it to Hyperledger v1 so it must be considered deprecated at this time. Instead, I suggest that you get comfortable with the Hyperledger Composer, which provides a huge development environment and a powerful data modelling language.
https://hyperledger.github.io/composer/introduction/introduction.html
2) Which leads me to IBM's free container service. If you want to get started with IBM Blockchain on Bluemix, you can create a free kubernetes cluster using the instructions found here.
https://ibm-blockchain.github.io/
The "create_all" script gives you a working fabric on a lite cluster (as in free) with hyperledger composer running (with playground) and with a copy of the example02 ubiquitous sample Go chaincode running on the same channel.
https://github.com/IBM-Blockchain/ibm-container-service
EDIT: As for the iot connection, you can use node-red to create iot apps that will catch your events on a topic and then forward them to the blockchain. This is for experimentation of course, but you will get the idea how an application must be written.
If you want to follow my "partial state as event" pattern in composer contracts, you can look at the deep-merge npm project and mimick that code while we wait for the node based chaincode that is coming in Fabric 1.1, at which time I hope that we can import it as normal in our business network js files.
Using deep-merge requires that you create your own transactions for create, replace, update and delete in your smart contracts, but these are straightforward. The bonus is that it is also easy then to emit custom events defining what happened to listening applications.
I think you will like these two technologies together.
Instead of using the IBM Blockchain, you should create your own Blockchain. You should use the Hyperledger Fabric for that. You have the documentacion about it here. I suggest you to start reading from the Building Your First Network chapter.
Then, you should integrate your Blockchain with the Watson IoT.

Alternative for IBM-Bluemix blockchain service which is using hyperledger fabric 1.0

Hi have been trying the hyperledger fabric 0.6 so far and was using IBM-Bluemix Block chain service to focus more on smart contract development. And now I am trying to use fabric 1.0 which provides more advanced features which suits my needs. But the problem is IBM-Bluemix service for the same is not available since the capacity of their beta reaches to maximum. So can anyone suggest if there is any alternative for this other than local dev environment setup since I have some security limitations in my system to install all the tools for the setup such as docker.
I am a product manager for Blockchain at IBM. If you use the Starter plan today (0.6) and are looking for a 1.0 equivalent, then check out the instructions here:
https://ibm-blockchain.github.io/
A final version of these instructions will be pulled directly into the Blockchain service on IBM-Bluemix in the coming weeks (pending an official announcement :) )
Let us know if you have any additional questions or feedback.
if you have access to AWS or similar services, you can take a look at https://github.com/litong01/fabric-deploy

How to rename validating peers in IBM Bluemix blockchain: starter developer plan beta

I am planning to do a demo blockchain implementation for asset sharing among my application instances. For that I am using the Hyperledger Fabric V0.6 service provided in IBM Bluemix blockchain(starter developer plan beta).
But in Network tab it is showing the 4 peers as Validating Peer 0, Validating Peer 1, Validating Peer 2 and Validating Peer 3.
Will it be possible to rename this peers to some name which is closely related to my business to identify them easily?
Thanks in advance.
IBM Bluemix Blockchain service based on Hyperledger Fabric v0.6 will soon be removed. Instead, the new Blockchain service(currently it's vNext Limited Beta, based on Hyperledger Fabric v1.0) will be officially supported. So, I would recommend you to do the demo based on the new version.
Back to your question, you can not rename the peers. But in vNext, you can customize your channel names and also chaincode name&version

OS Supporting Bluemix

If I were to setup IBM Bluemix local, what are the operating systems that can support the Bluemix software?
Been trying to look for answers in the internet but always end up frustrated because I can't find any answer. Even Bluemix site did not mention what is the OS requirement in setting up Bluemix.
Bluemix Local is not a software product that you can install in your own operating system. It runs in your environment but it is still a subscription.
The Bluemix Local install is only performed by IBM and it is an automated deployment of many virtual servers. It is also a managed offering, meaning that you don't have access to the operating system on those virtual machines. All the maintenance tasks are executed by IBM through a secure connection and a mechanism called Relay.
I guess you probably saw this link before, but the infrastructure requirements are described here: https://console.ng.bluemix.net/docs/local/index.html#localinfra
I think you may need Bluemix Support team to help you build the Bluemix local environment, Bluemix local is a cloud platform as a service that need to build on your infrastructure as a service.

What exactly is BlueMix in layman's terms?

How exactly would someone define BlueMix to an engineering major with little to no knowledge in Comp. Sci?
Bluemix is a fully managed cloud service so all of the operations activities such as maintenance, availability, upgrades are part of the Bluemix service, so users don't have to worry about setting up their own infrastructure or installing software.
Bluemix makes it easy for application developers to write applications as it is a polygot environment that supports many different languages and runtimes.
Applications in Bluemix can easily be scaled as needed leveraging the elasticity of the cloud. There are over 100 services available in Bluemix (both IBM and 3rd party services) which can be tied together to make robust applications and also to implement a microservices architecture.
Bluemix cloud services are available as part of the public multi-tenant cloud offering which runs on softlayer. There are also dedicated and local Bluemix cloud offerings available for users who don't want to use the public cloud or want to combine the different offerings to create a hybrid cloud.
it is a platform that lets you build, run, deploy applications via cloud. moreover, it handles multiple languages
Check Bluemix Overview topic in the docs: https://www.ng.bluemix.net/docs/overview/index.html