What is Anchor Peer in Fabric?

Question

There is step while configuring fabric network to update anchor peer. There is one anchor peer per organization, but not able to understand why do we need anchor peer.

Answer 1

A peer node on a channel that all other peers can discover and communicate with. Each Member on a channel has an anchor peer (or multiple anchor peers to prevent single point of failure), allowing for peers belonging to different Members to discover all existing peers on a channel.

You can read about this in glossary on hyperledjer fabric web site:

https://hyperledger-fabric.readthedocs.io/en/release-1.1/glossary.html#anchor-peer

Answer 2

A designated peer node for a specific Member on a channel that other Members’ peers can discover and communicate with Allows peers belonging to different Members to discover all existing peers on a channel Can designate multiple Anchor peer.

Answer 3

Anchors peers encoded into config update transaction in order to enable communication between peers of different organizations and discover all active participants of the channel.