Architecture¶

Design Principles¶

Umbra was designed having in mind the following guidance:

Fast and simple prototypes: with simple APIs it is possible to construct different topologies for blockchain networks to be experimented. Those are easily generated in any laptop, enabling deployments in small or large scale.
Lightweight execution: the source code is easily portable, installed and utilized in multiple underlying environments (e.g., laptop, cloud servers, etc).
Transparent reproduction: configuration files are recipes to be shared and executed in different environments for comparability among experiments, enabling reproducible research.

Umbra has three independent components:

design: defines APIs to implement the topology and events that will be respectively deployed and triggered when testing a blockchain platform.
broker: main component, responsible for the orchestration and management of the scenario (topology and events)
scenario: the actual interface that deploys the topology (i.e. network, containers, virtual switches)