Blog

One of the key features of Corda 5 is high availability (HA). A highly available system is one which guarantees some level of uptime by being resilient to faults that may occur during operation. In order to achieve this, the system needs to provide redundancy. This article will explore what kind of high availability that Corda 5 provides in contrast to previous releases of Corda, and how this is implemented in the context of executing flows.

If you’ve been reading the recent Corda 5 blog posts, you will already know that the architecture of Corda is changing. This change requires a re-think about the features that we offer to CorDapp developers, which are collectively known as Corda Services.

Starting as a product manager, among the strange creatures encountered on your path are so-called “user stories”. These usually appear as one-liners on product requirement documents and look like this: “As a [User] I want to do [Something] in order to [Achieve some other thing].” A vast amount of literature on user stories, how to write them and why they are useful is widely available, so there is little value in digging into those details. However, I believe it’s important to go through the reasons that they are a good tool to manage product development, but also to point out where they fall short; at least, for some type of products.

A good user experience helps people to enjoy the product they’re using. If you think of some of your favourite products and apps, you’ll be able to spot things which make it enjoyable. It’s probably been designed with empathy, by people who not only craft the experience but deliberately participate in it. It will have ...

This blog post looks to dig into one of the foundations of the new Corda 5 architecture, Virtual Nodes, and highlights the real-world impact of this architectural change. Let us first use a graph to lay out exactly what we were seeking to address with this change and deliver in Corda 5. Firstly, we wanted ...

Notaries are fundamental to securing the unspent transaction output (UTXO) based ledger that underpins Corda’s representation of tokens on a network. This is the first of a series of blog posts which will discuss how notaries fit into the Corda 5 architecture, and the new features that are going to be delivered as part of the Corda 5.0 release.

Corda 5 introduces a sandbox to the Corda infrastructure. This is a necessary addition in order to achieve multi-tenancy and high availability. This article will explore the benefits of the sandbox and what it means for Corda users. In follow-up articles we will explore this topic and its implementation more deeply.

Imagine a world where two people in completely different global and political locations could agree to something and see the results unfold simultaneously, with no slow reconciliation, no business processes involving faxes like the 1980s never ended. A world where data can actually be owned, and shared, not licensed through some central party with overarching control. Imagine your industry running on a single shared, yet secure, database. That was the founding vision of Corda. Five years on, how are we getting on and what have we learned?

Imagine a firm needs a new way for employees to book vacation. Or maybe customers want to be able to track their orders online. It’s your job to build the application. What design would you go with? Chances are you’ll build it in much the same way as everybody else does. There will be a database. There will be a business logic layer – you have a lot of choices here. And there will be a front-end – perhaps a mobile app or web-site, or a set of APIs. And then you have to worry about hosting it. Perhaps the HR department will host it in-house. Perhaps the supplier will host it in the cloud.

In this blog post we will show how to build and deploy a simple example of a Corda Distributed Application (CorDapp) for Corda 5 using a snapshot of Corda 5 from when it was first open sourced around mid May 2022. This CorDapp will run a workflow, AKA a “flow”, that calculates the sum of ...