Corda and Corda Enterprise 4.4 and
Corda Enterprise Network Manager 1.2 — Now Generally Available!

It’s been just a few short months since Corda and Corda Enterprise 4.3 and today we are pleased to announce the first releases since our switch to a quarterly cycle. This means you can expect updated software towards the end of each quarter from now on, bringing updates to all our core products.

While this was a relatively short release cycle, the R3 engineering team completed
a total of 296 features, bug fixes and docs improvements.

These all now packed into Corda, Corda Enterprise and our solution for private network setup, Corda Enterprise Network Manager.

Here’s a quick overview.

Enhancing the Developer Experience — Corda Open Source 4.4

True to our mission of making Corda the most developer-friendly platform around, Corda 4.4 provides some new enhancements:

• An asynchronous API has been introduced to suspend a flow while running external code, e.g. for long-running interactions with external systems
• A diagnostics API has been added that allows access to information about the node from within a CorDapp

There are a number of bug fixes and improvements, most notably to ensure ledger integrity in several edge cases. You can have a look at this talk from last year’s CordaCon for some background on the issues. Interesting and not very pleasant things can happen when database errors happen in a distributed system, and we have worked hard to further tighten the safety net and prevent any compromises to the ledger.

You can find the open source binaries for Corda 4.4 in artifactory, and as usual the source code on GitHub.

Building on the Enterprise Promise — Corda Enterprise 4.4

The continued focus for Corda Enterprise releases is to build on its market-leading resilience, performance, security and operational features.

Corda Enterprise 4.4 introduces performance improvements driven by real-world demands from customers looking not only at throughput volume, but also speed of transaction validation.

Fine-tuning Performance

Corda Enterprise 4.4. delivers:

• Reduced communications latency, by tweaking and optimizing the integration with Artemis MQs, to ensure low latency while keeping throughput and the persistence guarantees in the case of errors.
• Faster resolution of long transaction back chains, by introducing smart bulk fetches.

Enhancing Operations

On the operations side, registration of HA notaries has been simplified and the node health survey report has been streamlined and fully integrated.

Understanding node behavior and health is mission-critical and the health survey report sees further enhancements to enable connectivity checks that verify peer and network connectivity of new node deployments, saving operators’ time during deployments and upgrades.

Security

Our provision of packaged integrations with the industry’s most well known Hardware Security Modules is continued with additional support for node Certificate Authority (CA) and legal identity key storage in nCipher Shield Connect HSMs. Notary shared service keys can now also be stored in Utimaco, Gemalto Luna and nCipher HSMs. You can find a continually updated overview of our HSM support in the documentation.

Download Corda Enterprise 4.4 at r3.com/download-corda-enterprise

The Packaged Solution for Private Networks —
Corda Enterprise Network Manager 1.2

In tandem with this release, Corda Enterprise Network Manager 1.2 is now available — delivering faster test network deployment, support for third party signing services and more streamlined and sophisticated node registration workflows.  Official Kubernetes-friendly Docker images are now available for Corda Enterprise Network Manager, as well as a first reference deployment with Helm and Kubernetes. This enables simple, fast out-of-the-box test network deployment to complement your development cycle or a reference network for your production deployment.

A new optional pluggable interface allows network operators to elect to use third-party software or service providers to manage the signing events required by their network services.

The release also adds:

• Support for AWS cloud HSMs, using customer provided signing services (external PKI)
• A CRL (Certificate Revocation List) endpoint checking tool for verifying all CRLs for a hierarchy of certificates can be fetched
• The ability to run flag days without restarting the network map service,
• Bug fixes.

Corda Enterprise Network Manager 1.2 is recommended for all new deployments.  However,
this release is not a required upgrade for any deployments already up to date with
Corda Enterprise Network Manager 1.1.

Try Corda Enterprise Network Manager 1.2 at r3.com/download-corda-enterprise-network-manager