Unveiling Corda and Corda Enterprise 4.5 and Corda Network Enterprise Manager 1.3

We’re back with another release for Corda, Corda Enterprise and Corda Enterprise Network Manager (C.E.N.M or “Cinnamon” for those with insider knowledge). We are grateful that the entire workforce was able to transition to working from home. Even though the quality of the coffee may vary, our engineering team kept the hard work and momentum going, resulting in another on time release. This was the first time the R3 team from the new Dublin office were able to contribute in a meaningful way to our quarterly product releases, and I’m proud to be able to highlight all their hard work. Éire Abú.

Continuing our trend of firsts, this was the first full quarter of development work uninterrupted by holidays. The result? We have submitted 1000+ new commits in this release cycle!

Accelerating blockchain transactions

We’ve delivered several substantial improvements this quarter, starting with a significant reduction in the latency of completing multi-party transactions. The market has been focused on performance as it relates to TPS (transactions per second). We’re bringing the speed with faster end-to-end transaction completion. We’ve unleashed the potential of this lesser considered aspect of performance for our customers, so they can differentiate their own applications.

For customers who need transactions to settle quickly to overcome the risks and costs associated with long settlement timeframes (e.g. in capital markets trading), Corda Enterprise is now able to deliver sub-second settlement, with little or no impact on latency the more participants are added to a transaction. In Corda Enterprise 4.5 we have parallelized signature collection and sped up backchain resolution to deliver a 13X reduction in latency to ensure Corda Enterprise remains the leading enterprise blockchain platform for high volume, multi-party transactions.

Advancing industry-level workflows and introducing Ledger Recovery

One of the most valued components of Corda just got an upgrade with the new Flow Framework API.

We’ve added greater sophistication to reduce the time taken to send messages and improved the performance of flows that involve multiple counterparties. We’ve also added improvements around flow termination.

For Corda Enterprise we’ve continued to build out the operational toolset to enable the recovery of missing data from peer nodes in the case of a disaster scenario. Now you can search for inconsistencies on the ledger and make requests to recover data from network peers–all while maintaining the integrity and value of the private peer-to-peer model that Corda is known for.

Lastly, we’ve included enhancements around compliance and security which means that nodes now maintain an audit trail of any user(s) who tried to launch an RPC (Remote Procedure Call) operation.

Simplifying cloud deployment

As we place more focus on cloud deployment and containerization, this release delivers several advancements that continue to simplify and standardize Corda Enterprise deployment.

We’ve released Corda Enterprise images on DockerHub and have also refreshed Azure Cloud deployment templates to speed up the roll-out of a Corda Enterprise development network, nodes to an existing network, or the complete deployment of both. We anticipate this will be useful for those who want to test their CorDapp designs in the cloud.

We have also added AWS CloudHSM integration to our matrix of supported HSMs to secure keys used by the node. Additionally, the notary can now also store service keys in AWS CloudHSM for additional security.

Quality of life improvements for network operators

The team building Corda Enterprise Network Manager has delivered several great new features as part of its 1.3 release. We now offer R.B.A.C (Role Based Access Control) for users operating Corda networks through a new interface for user authentication and authorization.

A new Command Line Interface has also been rolled out to streamline network operations. Now you can sit back and conduct all your network management activities with ease from a single location (presuming you are an entitled user that is). Network managers will no longer lose time moving between components, so you can use all that new free time to scale up your network!

And there’s more…

· A new tool has been added to support automated metering collection for CorDapp publishers

· The Token SDK now offers a consistent API in both Java and Kotlin

· The Kubernetes reference deployment has been enhanced for Corda Enterprise Network Manager

As an engineer, it’s really exciting when you get to deliver something new to the community and even more exciting to see how it’s used and receiving the feedback!

Hopefully next time I get to write one of these I’ll have happily returned to the shiny new Dublin office — even if that means I don’t get to work in my dressing gown quite as much.

Get Corda Open Source 4.5 here: https://github.com/corda/corda/tree/release/os/4.5

Download Corda Enterprise 4.5 at r3.com/download-corda-enterprise

Read the full docs and release notes at https://docs.https://corda.net/docs/corda-enterprise/4.5.html

Sin é for now !
James Mac Mahon, the Original R3 Dublin Office Engineer