v2.3.3 Release Notes - September 8, 2021

Improvements

peer - New configuration option to disable gossip block forwarding

If all peers in an organization explicitly set peer.deliveryclient.blockGossipEnabled to false,
no peer in the organization gossips blocks to any other peer in that organization.
Use this setting when all peers pull blocks from ordering service. For more
information see deprecation announcement below: FAB-15317: Block dissemination via gossip is deprecated.

orderer - [FAB-18484] Return transaction forwarding result back to the client synchronously

With this improvement a Raft follower waits for the transaction to be forwarded to the Raft leader,
and returns the result (success or failure) back to the client accordingly.
Prior to this improvement, the Raft follower returned success after enqueueing it into the message queue,
which might have resulted in the transaction being dropped but a success being returned to the client.
Application clients should still monitor transaction commit events, since the Raft leader is not guaranteed
to deliver the transaction into a block in exception scenarios, but this improvement avoids
transactions from being dropped when there are connection issues between a Raft follower and Raft leader.

peer and orderer - Make gRPC maximum message size configurable

This improvement makes gRPC maximum message size configurable in peer and orderer.
Previously the maximum message size was hardcoded to 100 megabytes.
Since all nodes should be consistent it is recommended to keep
the default value of 100 megabytes for MaxRecvMsgSize & MaxSendMsgSize.
The value can be configured if needed however.
Configure in peer core.yaml with peer.maxRecvMsgSize and peer.maxSendMsgSize.
Configure in orderer orderer.yaml with General.MaxRecvMsgSize and General.MaxSendMsgSize.

Fixes

orderer - [FAB-18521] Consenters' metadata is not replicated while OSN catches up with snapshot

If an ordering service node crashes while replicating blocks from another ordering service,
the consenters metadata will not be available and the ordering service node will not be
able to reconnect to the consenter set upon restart. This fix ensures that an ordering
service node that is replicating blocks persists the consenters metadata so that it
can reconnect to the consenter set.

Dependencies

Fabric v2.3.3 has been tested with the following dependencies:

• Go 1.16.7
• CouchDB v3.1.1

Deprecations (existing)

FAB-15754: The 'Solo' consensus type is deprecated.

The 'Solo' consensus type has always been marked non-production and should be in
use only in test environments, however for compatibility it is still available,
but may be removed entirely in a future release.

FAB-16408: The 'Kafka' consensus type is deprecated.

The 'Raft' consensus type was introduced in v1.4.1 and has become the preferred
production consensus type. There is a documented and tested migration path from
Kafka to Raft, and existing users should migrate to the newer Raft consensus type.
For compatibility with existing deployments, Kafka is still supported,
but may be removed entirely in a future release.
Additionally, the fabric-kafka and fabric-zookeeper docker images are no longer updated, maintained, or published.

Fabric CouchDB image is deprecated

v2.2.0 added support for CouchDB 3.1.0 as the recommended and tested version of CouchDB.
If prior versions are utilized, a Warning will appear in peer log.
Note that CouchDB 3.1.0 requires that an admin username and password be set,
while this was optional in CouchDB v2.x. See the
Fabric CouchDB documentation
for configuration details.
Also note that CouchDB 3.1.0 default max_document_size is reduced to 8MB. Set a higher value if needed in your environment.
Finally, the fabric-couchdb docker image will not be updated to v3.1.0 and will no longer be updated, maintained, or published.
Users can utilize the official CouchDB docker image maintained by the Apache CouchDB project instead.

FAB-7559: Support for specifying orderer endpoints at the global level in channel configuration is deprecated.

Utilize the new 'OrdererEndpoints' stanza within the channel configuration of an organization instead.
Configuring orderer endpoints at the organization level accommodates
scenarios where orderers are run by different organizations. Using
this configuration ensures that only the TLS CA certificates of that organization
are used for orderer communications, in contrast to the global channel level endpoints which
would cause an aggregation of all orderer TLS CA certificates across
all orderer organizations to be used for orderer communications.

FAB-17428: Support for configtxgen flag --outputAnchorPeersUpdate is deprecated.

The --outputAnchorPeersUpdate mechanism for updating anchor peers has always had
limitations (for instance, it only works the first time anchor peers are updated).
Instead, anchor peer updates should be performed through the normal config update flow.

FAB-15406: The fabric-tools docker image is deprecated

The fabric-tools docker image will not be published in future Fabric releases.
Instead of using the fabric-tools docker image, users should utilize the
published Fabric binaries. The Fabric binaries can be used to make client calls
to Fabric runtime components, regardless of where the Fabric components are running.

FAB-15317: Block dissemination via gossip is deprecated

Block dissemination via gossip is deprecated and may be removed in a future release.
Fabric peers can be configured to receive blocks directly from an ordering service
node by using the following configuration:

peer.gossip.orgLeader: true
peer.gossip.useLeaderElection: false
peer.gossip.state.enabled: false
peer.deliveryclient.blockGossipEnabled: false

FAB-15061: Legacy chaincode lifecycle is deprecated

The legacy chaincode lifecycle from v1.x is deprecated and will be removed
in a future release. To prepare for the eventual removal, utilize the v2.x
chaincode lifecycle instead, by enabling V2_0 application capability on all
channels, and redeploying all chaincodes using the v2.x lifecycle. The new
chaincode lifecycle provides a more flexible and robust governance model
for chaincodes. For more details see the
documentation for enabling the new lifecycle.

Changes:

• 9955302 Release commit for v2.3.3 (#2903)
• b5eb7f0 Fixed a typo in private_data_tutorial
• 5be686f Update Go to v1.16.7 and alpine to 3.14 (release-2.3) (#2874)
• 0ebd9cf platform/golang: loosen assertion for Go 1.16.2 (#2480)
• c5c1acc deps: bump testify (release-2.3) (#2885) [ #2336 ]
• cf3470b Update x509.CertPool equality checks (#2879)
• 67d3523 Clean up Go modules (#2875)
• 758735b Stop spamming for wait channel acquirement in orderer integration test
• 497d3ab Options for GRPC message size configurable
• cc88dfa Change name of comm msg size default consts