Prepared by Eugene (Yevgeniy) Yarmosh

Project

Hyperledger Avalon

Project Health

The Avalon team has been working according to its 2020 plan and is on track to release 0.6 version in July. This release includes baseline implementation for the worker pools (a foundation for the TEE scalability), separation of the key management from the work order execution, initial K8S support and improved cryptographic support. The team has also completed evaluation and prototyping for LibOS runtime integration (Graphene, Occlum, SGX-LKL). The team participated in a number of the industry events even though Covid19 has a high negative impact in this area. The upcoming release 0.7 shall focus on auto-scaling (by utilizing K8S), LibOS runtime integration and test automation integrated with CI.  The team continued to focus on expanding its community and contributor's diversity. 

Questions/Issues for the TSC

There are no issues for the TSC currently.

Releases

July 2020 – Release 0.6 shall address the following

The next plan is to have 0.7 release at the end of the year with 2-3 intermediate stable releases (0.6.1, 0.6.2, etc.).

Overall Activity in the Past Quarter

Avalon team was focused on scalability and key management isolation along with overall code improvements and prototyping for upcoming releases.

Avalon team participated in the following activities:

There are at least 7 active maintainers. Covid19 slowed community building activities. 

Current Plans

The Avalon team planned to have quarterly release but realized that this cadence is not optimal. Primary reason is complex nature of the tasks under development. Additional reason is a three-week sprint pattern utilized by the team. Overall, this pattern works well for the team, but having only four sprints between releases makes it hard to address unforeseen changes. Based on the above the plan was changed to have  

Next release 0.7 will focus on

The team plans to regularly review GIHUB issues and consider utilizing JIRA for the project management. Avalon Developer Forum calls (every other weeks) generally proofed to be frequent enough, but the team still considers starting a new series of Avalon Architecture Forum calls.

Integrated to building up Avalon community and to mitigate Covid19 impact, the team will look for the online opportunities and will publish technical blogs and user case studies along with additional video tutorials.

Maintainer Diversity

Formal Avalon maintainer list has not changed during this quarter, but we started ramping up a new maintainer candidate from Wipro and in the process of recruiting maintainer candidates from three more organizations. Based on the recent activity and our current plans we anticipate that the Avalon maintainers list will be extended in the second half of 2020.


Contributor Diversity

Avalon project gets contributions and participation from multiple companies – Intel, WiPro, IBM, iExec, Kaleido and Santander. AntFin Occlum team modified Occlum project according to the Avalon requirements in preparation for Occlum runtime integration with Avalon. The project team sees a lot of interest from and anticipates additional contributions from ConcenSys Health and Chainlink.

Avalon Developer Forum calls happens every other week well attended by members from different organizations. Building up Avalon community was less efficient during Q2 of 2020 primarily due to bigger than expected Covid19 impact. In Q3 and Q3 of 2020 the team will work on expanding Avalon community by more actively utilizing on-line industry events, video tutorials and publishing blogs and case studies.

Additional Information

None at this time.

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