What’s new in v1.2

A quick rundown of the new features and documentation in the v1.2 release of Hyperledger Fabric:

New major features

• Private Data Collections: A way to keep certain data/transactions confidential among a subset of channel members. We also have an architecture document on this topic which can be found here.
• Service Discovery: Discover network services dynamically, including orderers, peers, chaincode, and endorsement policies, to simplify client applications.
• Access control: How to configure which client identities can interact with peer functions on a per channel basis.
• Pluggable endorsement and validation: Utilize pluggable endorsement and validation logic per chaincode.

New tutorials

• Upgrade to version v1.2: Leverages the BYFN network to show how an upgrade flow should work. Includes both a script (which can serve as a template for upgrades), as well as the individual commands.
• CouchDB: How to set up a CouchDB data store (which allows for rich queries).
• Private data: Shows how to set up a collection using BYFN.
• Query certificates based on various filter criteria (Fabric CA): Describes how to use fabric-ca-client to manage certificates.

New conceptual documentation

• Fabric network as a concept: A look at the structure of the various pieces of a Fabric network and how they interact.
• Private data: See above.

Other new documentation

• Service Discovery CLI: Configuring the discovery service using the CLI.

Release notes

For more information, including FAB numbers for the issues and code reviews that made up these changes (in addition to other hygiene/performance/bug fixes we did not explicitly document), check out the:

• Fabric release notes.
• Fabric CA release notes.