hyperledger - What is the difference between MSP and Fabric CA?

Question

Is Fabric CA an implementation of MSP? Is an MSP useless by itself?

What are the functions of the MSP and Fabric CA? And differences in those functions?

Answer 1

MSP is a Membership Service Provider - pluggable interface to support variety of credentials architectures, basically offering abstraction layer for membership orchestration architecture. MSP abstraction provides:

1. Concrete identity format
2. User credential validation
3. User credential revocation
4. Signature generation and verification

While Fabric-CA used to generate certificates and keys to actually initialize MSP facilities. Fabric-CA is a default implementation of MSP interface to cover identity management.