How to Build a Hyperledger Besu Blockchain

We've written a guide about how to build a blockchain, and that piece outlined all the chain options Kaleido offers. It included steps to set up an account and how to build your network. In this piece, we're going to talk specifically about Hyperledger Besu.

Create a Business Network

Once you've created a free account on Kaleido, you can start building a blockchain. Kaleido supports Enterprise Ethereum, Corda, and Hyperledger Fabric as standard blockchain protocol providers, as well as a multi-party orchestration framework called FireFly. We've also added a number of different chain configuarations, from sidechains to appchains, and public nodes. Regardless of your environment/protocol choice, the first step is to establish a business network that will serve as the parental resource for blockchain environments and the various runtimes within.

• Visit https://console.kaleido.io/signup and enter your organizational email + password to login.
• Click the Create Network button in the middle of the page.
• Provide a name for your business network and optionally include some legalese or rhetoric describing your network mission. Click NEXT.

Select a cloud provider and underlying region to serve as the home region for your network. This will, in turn, whitelist the selected cloud provider and underlying region, and is where your resources will be hosted on the Starter Plan. The choices are AWS US East, AWS EU Central, AWS APAC Southeast, AWS APAC Northeast, Microsoft Azure US West, and Microsoft Azure France. Click NEXT.

Note that multi-region consortium are not available on the Starter Plan. If you wish to enable multi-region capabilities, refer to the Manage Plan section in our docs for instructions on upgrading your subscription. Click Finish to finalize your consortium.

At this point, your business network is simply a namespace with an underlying home region, a name, and your Kaleido organization existing as the sole membership.

In the lefthand navigation menu, click the Governance tab and then Memberships to see the existing memberships in your business network. As the founder, your organization is automatically attributed to the first membership in the network.

You can add additional memberships by clicking the ADD MEMBERSHIP button under your current memberships. Any subsequent memberships will be bound to your organization.

Memberships are the Kaleido resource that is bound to nodes, services, and security credentials. Adding additional memberships is a useful technique for networks where resources need to be proxy operated, or in scenarios where an operator wishes to mock out the future participation of a decentralized network. For this quick start, we will proceed with a single membership.

Switch back to your business network home page by clicking the Dashboard tab in the lefthand navigation menu.

Next, click the Create Environment button to generate your first blockchain namespace. An environment in Kaleido is an isolated domain with nodes, services, and security credentials confined solely to it. Each environment is its own unique blockchain.

Choosing an Environment Type

Kaleido offers two top-level environment types: Standard Blockchain Service and Standard Blockchain Service + FireFly SuperNode.

Choose the Standard Blockchain Service tile and then click NEXT.

The Standard Blockchain Service orchestration supports three protocol choices: Enterprise Ethereum variants (Geth, Quorum and Besu), Corda, and Hyperledger Fabric. In this tutorial we're going to select Ethereum, but you can see how easy it is to select the protocol of your choice.

Choose the Hyperledger Besu tile and click NEXT.

Bootstrap your Besu environment

Now that the environment has been created, we can start to deploy the requisite Besu building blocks.

The first two runtimes that you need are a Certificate Authority and an Orderer Node. The Certificate Authority is responsible for registering and enrolling end user identities, and provides the underlying x509 PKI material needed for authentication. The Orderer Node is tasked with verifying and packaging endorsed transaction objects from client applications and delivering them back to peer nodes within a block.

Click the CREATE NODE button in the middle of the screen.

The first action is to create an Orderer Node. Use the dropdown menu and choose the available membership that you wish to bind the node to.

Supply a name for the Orderer Node (e.g. Orderer 1) and click NEXT.

The subsequent step will prompt you to start setting up Kaleido services. These configurations can also be edited after you create the node.

Click NEXT to skip the cloud integrations panel. These are unavailable on the Starter Plan and are out of scope for this tutorial. Refer to the Manage Plan section of the docs if you wish to upgrade your subscription and subsequently apply cloud integrations.

Leave the default configuration of "Small" on the final panel, and then click FINISH to deploy the Orderer Node and CA.

Once you set up your node and see that's it's started, you'll see buttons to begin working with your chain. 

For example, if you click the Import Smart Contract button you can see all the ways Kaleido allows you to start adding business logic to your environment.

Hyperledger Besu on Kaleido offers a robust, secure, and scalable solution for businesses and developers looking to harness the power of blockchain technology. By following the outlined process, users can efficiently create a blockchain network tailored to their specific needs, whether it be for supply chain management, financial transactions, or any other decentralized application.

If you want to use this tutorial to start a Besu chain of your own, follow this link to start a free trial.