# Hyperledger Fabric

Hyperledger Fabric is an open source enterprise-grade permissioned distributed ledger technology (DLT) platform, designed for use in enterprise contexts, that delivers some key differentiating capabilities over other popular distributed ledger or blockchain platforms.

Fabric has a highly **modular** and **configurable** architecture, enabling innovation, versatility and optimization for a broad range of industry use cases including banking, finance, insurance, healthcare, human resources, supply chain and even digital music delivery.

At a high level, Fabric is comprised of the following modular components:

* A pluggable *ordering service* establishes consensus on the order of transactions and then broadcasts blocks to peers.
* A pluggable *membership service provider* is responsible for associating entities in the network with cryptographic identities.
* An optional *peer-to-peer gossip service* disseminates the blocks output by ordering service to other peers.
* Smart contracts (“chaincode”) run within a container environment (e.g. Docker) for isolation. They can be written in standard programming languages but do not have direct access to the ledger state.
* The ledger can be configured to support a variety of DBMSs.
* A pluggable endorsement and validation policy enforcement that can be independently configured per application.

Hyperledger Fabric can be configured in multiple ways to satisfy the diverse solution requirements for multiple industry use cases.

More information can be found on the official [Hyperledger Fabric documentation website](https://hyperledger-fabric.readthedocs.io/en/latest/).