Upgrading to the Newest Version of Fabric

At a high level, upgrading a Fabric network from v1.3 to v1.4 can be performed by following these steps:

• Upgrade the binaries for the ordering service, the Fabric CA, and the peers. These upgrades may be done in parallel.

• Upgrade client SDKs.

• (Optional) Upgrade the Kafka cluster.

To help understand this process, we’ve created the Upgrading Your Network Components tutorial that will take you through most of the major upgrade steps, including upgrading peers and orderers. We’ve included both a script as well as the individual steps to achieve these upgrades.

Because our tutorial leverages the Building Your First Network (BYFN) sample, it has certain limitations (it does not use Fabric CA, for example). Therefore we have included a section at the end of the tutorial that will show how to upgrade your CA, Kafka clusters, CouchDB, Zookeeper, vendored chaincode shims, and Node SDK clients.

Because there are no new Capability Requirements in v1.4, the upgrade process does not require any channel configuration transactions.