Before revision: Many proofs of concept blockchain applications built using Hyperledger Fabric, a permissioned blockchain platform, have recently been transformed into production. However, the performance provided by Hyperledger Fabric is of significant concern for enterprises due to steady growth in network usage. Hence, in this paper, we study the performance achieved in a Fabricnetwork using vertical scaling (i.e., by adding more vCPUs) and horizontal scaling (i. e., by adding more nodes) techniques.
After revision: Permissioned blockchains are becoming popular as data management systems in the enterprise setting. Compared to traditional distributed databases, blockchain platforms provide increased security guarantees but significantly lower performance. Further, these platforms are quite expensive to run for the low throughput they provide. The following are two ways to improve performance and reduce cost: (1) make the system utilize allocated resources efficiently; (2) allow rapid and dynamic scaling of allocated resources based on load. We explore both of these in this work. We first investigate the reasons for the poor performance and scalability of the dominant permissioned blockchain flavor called Execute-Order-Validate (EOV). We do this by studying the scaling characteristics of Hyperledger Fabric, a popular EOV platform, using vertical scaling (i.e., by adding more vCPUs) and horizontal scaling (i. e., by adding more nodes) techniques.