Deploy a Multicloud AI-powered Blockchain Project Management Platform
Teknobuilt provides a construction management software-as-a-service (SaaS) PACE OS platform for its global operations throughout Canada, US, United Kingdom, Middle East, North Africa, and Asia. The platform helps engineering and design firms, construction contractors, and material suppliers more efficiently manage their engineering work packages, progress reports, safety assessments, and more.
Built using Oracle Blockchain Platform, Teknobuilt's construction management application creates immutable (unchangeable) records, which capture every construction project transaction, enabling all project stakeholders to quickly generate smart contracts, process payments, track carbon footprints, and manage conflict-free change requests.
Teknobuilt's blockchain application connects all construction project's stakeholders, phases, and workflows together. Every team member has access to a single and dynamic source of truth that helps them track materials, timelines, and budgets. It also helps eliminate undocumented change requests, rework, and waste, which has climbed to 600 million tons per year in the construction industry alone. Teknobuilt uses OCI security services to manage encryption, access controls, and compliance. Teknobuilt’s implementation method is designed for scale and interoperability and it is continuously optimized to accommodate diverse stakeholders and projects of varying scale.
Highlights of Teknobuilt's deployment
Highlights include the following:
- Project management activities are governed and secured, using Oracle Blockchain Platform
- Traffic is authenticated between AWS and OCI tenancies through web application firewalls (WAFs) and APIs
- Transactions are managed through REST API services
- Integration component is built natively in Teknobuilt's PACE OS platform, which communicates directly to the blockchain stack on OCI
- Disaster recovery policy is provided natively in the Oracle Blockchain Platform
Benefits of the Teknobuilt deployment on OCI
Teknobuilt’s implementation of Oracle Blockchain Platform provides a myriad of performance improvements across the entire construction management lifecycle, from design and delivery, to supply chain and construction management, including:
- Increased speed of transactions and capital efficiencies: A secure, digital ledger with clear accountability, speeds up information hand-over and payment processing
- Improved carbon footprint tracking: Carbon consumption and emission metrics can be quantified in an auditable manner
- Trusted claims management: Any changes and potential claims are managed by data-driven precision and trust
- More accurate decision making and accountability: With the blockchain application, stakeholders can benefit from a robust and secure system that empowers them to make informed decisions swiftly, and securely
Architecture
Teknobuilt has built and deployed its SaaS application (PACE OS) in a multicloud deployment model. The blockchain platform is deployed on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), while the SaaS application is deployed on Amazon Web Services (AWS).
A PACE OS instance is provisioned for each Primary Contractor (Primary). As the owners of their instances, the Primaries then grant access to their internal and external partners, which may include engineering and design firms, construction companies, and material suppliers. The PACE OS provides workflow automation that is customized for Primaries, allowing them to manage their construction projects. Oracle Blockchain Platform, when used in project management use cases, allows for better collaboration between Primaries and their contractors, while ensuring all parties share a single source of truth for change requests and other transactions.
For example, when a Primary makes a change request (CR) in the PACE OS app, the request is sent to the blockchain so the Primary's partners can view and approve the CR in real-time. These approvals are kept on the blockchain so there are no discrepancies on changes and who approved the changes. This ensures that the records are secure and not tampered with, allowing the Primary to minimize and control timelines, budgets, and resources with minimal (if any) dispute.
An Oracle Blockchain Platform instance is deployed for each Primary along with a peer node. Additional peer nodes are then added for the corresponding partners (engineers, designers, construction managers, and suppliers). If the Primary onboards additional partners, then they can choose to add more peers.
A Rest Proxy node is automatically deployed on creation of an Oracle Blockchain Platform instance. The PACE OS and clients communicate with the blockchain through the Rest Proxy in the REST API.
In this deployment model, Teknobuilt deployed eight OCPs and 150 GB of storage. Because Oracle Blockchain Platform is an OCI managed service (PaaS), the platform is deployed in a production-ready high availability configuration across three availability domains or three fault domains. Teknobuilt runs its workloads out of the OCI Region in Montreal, which contains one availability domain with three fault domains. The instance can scale dynamically.
Teknobuilt’s “Digital Container Blocks” moves vast amounts of data generated from participants during the design, development, procurement, construction planning and field execution phases of each project.
The platform allows multiple participants, such as contractors, suppliers, architects, and regulators to access and contribute to the system. This ensures that all relevant parties have equal access to the information, promoting collaboration and transparency throughout the project lifecycle.
The distributed and decentralized nature of Oracle Blockchain Platform allows Teknobuilt to store vast amounts of data across multiple nodes, ensuring scalability and resilience. It ensures that the system can handle an increasing volume of data generated by multiple participants across the entire construction project lifecycle, while maintaining data integrity, security, and accessibility. Teknobuilt’s platform also maintains the immutable nature of the blockchain across multiple cloud platforms (in this case AWS and OCI), while allowing for secure and reliable data storage, making it more flexible, efficient, and less burdensome for project participants.
Description of the illustration teknobuilt-arch-oci.png
teknobuilt-arch-oci-oracle.zip
In this deployment model, Teknobuilt has deployed eight OCPs and 150 GB of storage. Since the Oracle Blockchain Platform is an OCI managed service (PaaS), Oracle Blockchain Platform is deployed in a production-ready high availability configuration across three availability domains or three fault domains. Teknobuilt runs its workloads out of the OCI Region of Montreal, which contains one availability domain with three fault domains. The instance will also scale dynamically.
This architecture has the following components:
- Region
An Oracle Cloud Infrastructure region is a localized geographic area that contains one or more data centers, called availability domains. Regions are independent of other regions, and vast distances can separate them (across countries or even continents).
- Availability domains
Availability domains are standalone, independent data centers within a region. The physical resources in each availability domain are isolated from the resources in the other availability domains, which provides fault tolerance. Availability domains don’t share infrastructure such as power or cooling, or the internal availability domain network. So, a failure at one availability domain is unlikely to affect the other availability domains in the region.
- Virtual cloud network (VCN) and subnets
A VCN is a customizable, software-defined network that you set up in an Oracle Cloud Infrastructure region. Like traditional data center networks, VCNs give you complete control over your network environment. A VCN can have multiple non-overlapping CIDR blocks that you can change after you create the VCN. You can segment a VCN into subnets, which can be scoped to a region or to an availability domain. Each subnet consists of a contiguous range of addresses that don't overlap with the other subnets in the VCN. You can change the size of a subnet after creation. A subnet can be public or private.
- Route table
Virtual route tables contain rules to route traffic from subnets to destinations outside a VCN, typically through gateways.
- Security list
For each subnet, you can create security rules that specify the source, destination, and type of traffic that must be allowed in and out of the subnet.
- Internet gateway
The internet gateway allows traffic between the public subnets in a VCN and the public internet.
- Block Chain Platform
Oracle Blockchain Platform is a managed blockchain service, which provides a tamper-proof distributed ledger to record issuance (minting) of NFTs and maintain NFT transaction history, and infrastructure nodes to run smart contracts for NFT transactions. It is a preassembled, permissioned platform based on Hyperledger Fabric that can operate on its own or as part of a network consisting of validating nodes (peers). These nodes update the ledger and respond to queries by running smart contract code, the business logic that runs on the blockchain.
- LoggingLogging is a highly scalable and fully managed service that provides access to the following types of logs from your resources in the cloud:
- Audit logs: Logs related to events emitted by the Audit service.
- Service logs: Logs emitted by individual services such as API Gateway, Events, Functions, Load Balancing, Object Storage, and VCN flow logs.
- Custom logs: Logs that contain diagnostic information from custom applications, other cloud providers, or an on-premises environment.
- Policy
An Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Identity and Access Management policy specifies who can access which resources, and how. Access is granted at the group and compartment level, which means you can write a policy that gives a group a specific type of access within a specific compartment, or to the tenancy.
- Identity and Access Management (IAM)
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Identity and Access Management (IAM) is the access control plane for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and Oracle Cloud Applications. The IAM API and the user interface enable you to manage identity domains and the resources within the identity domain. Each OCI IAM identity domain represents a standalone identity and access management solution or a different user population.
- Object storage
Object storage provides quick access to large amounts of structured and unstructured data of any content type, including database backups, analytic data, and rich content such as images and videos. You can safely and securely store and then retrieve data directly from the internet or from within the cloud platform. You can seamlessly scale storage without experiencing any degradation in performance or service reliability. Use standard storage for "hot" storage that you need to access quickly, immediately, and frequently. Use archive storage for "cold" storage that you retain for long periods of time and seldom or rarely access.
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