Service discovery

In the context of the integration to Hyperledger Fabric and Composer, the concept of service discovery is focussed on documenting and exposing the artifacts from Fabric: CA, peers, and orderers to the calling application. 

As we now have experienced, in order for the application to get a transaction endorsed and added to the ledger, it needs to be able to interact with numerous components of these types. Having a way to maintain this information as a service configuration element will enable teams to quickly adapt to the evolving nature of the network.

Currently, when developing client applications using the Fabric SDK, the developer is responsible for managing and applying this service configuration.

Part of the roadmap of Hyperledger Fabric is the intent to facilitate this configuration.

One of the benefits of relying on a component such as the  Composer REST gateway is that service discovery is provided by the gateway. Concretely, as you will soon discover, it provides the concept of a business card which contains both the identity information along with a  connection profile, which has the list of Hyperledger Fabric services that can be used to execute transactions.