Hyperledger's Brian Behlendorf: Blockchain for Business

One of the things I love most about interviewing the people behind tech projects is coincidentally discovering your subject is a bonafide technology visionary. Brian Behlendorf was one of the key developers behind the Apache Web Server and is a Mozilla and EFF board member, three projects I respect massively. For this interview, we only had time to cover his current role, as Executive Director of the Hyperledger Foundation, a project that aims to bring blockchain mainstream.

Multiple Frameworks, One Cohesive Project

Hyperledger currently consists of five projects and three tools. Some existed before Hyperledger, and others were new, but the project is working on making the connections between them as cohesive as possible. They aim to provide a solution for every requirement you have when creating blockchain-based applications. The projects cross over a lot in terms of functionality and use cases. Hyperledger as an organization is more about governance and support than providing a complete technical solution.

Getting started with each of the projects varies, some are SDKs for building other tools and others are complete platforms, so you will need to undertake a reasonable amount of reading across the projects to find what you need and how to use it. Whilst Hyperledger aims to make blockchain suitable and attractive to business, using their tooling still requires a modicum of knowledge and each separate project could be an article in itself.

The three tools help tie the projects together, providing solutions for deployment, a "composer" tool, and visualizing a blockchain and its constituent parts.

Next Steps

Whilst knowing where to start with the official Hyperledger documentation is hard, third parties have contributed a handful of resources that are useful to give you a better overview.

• IBM’s blockchain offering is built upon Hyperledger. Their documentation is a good starting point.
• More from IBM, two of their employees delivered a presentation at Devoxx US about Hyperledger.