Amazon has opened up its blockchain service, Amazon Managed Blockchain, for general availability. Amazon Managed Blockchain is a fully managed service which, the company claims, will make it easy to create and manage scalable blockchain networks. The service was announced during the company’s annual conference in November last year, and has been in preview for months.
Amazon Managed Blockchain
Through a press release on Tuesday, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced that Amazon Managed Blockchain is now generally available. It is initially available in northern Virginia and will be expanding to other regions in the coming year. The service supports popular open source frameworks like Hyperledger Fabric and Ethereum. However, only the former is supported at launch. AWS says Ethereum support is coming later this year.
As a decentralised ledger, Amazon Managed Blockchain will suit “customers who want to allow multiple parties to execute transactions and maintain a cryptographically verifiable record of them without the need for a trusted, central authority”. The service eliminates the complexity of setting up a blockchain network for customers, and hence is cost effective. Customers can simply choose their preferred framework, add network members, and configure the member nodes that process transaction requests. Amazon Managed Blockchain takes care of provisioning nodes, setting up the network, managing certificates and security, and scaling the network.
Amazon Managed Blockchain is coupled by Amazon Quantum Ledger Database (QLDB), a fully managed ledger database with a central trusted authority. QLDB makes it easy to replicate or extract blockchain network activity data. It will be generally available in the coming months.
AT&T, Nestlé, MOBI, and Accenture are among the companies using Amazon’s blockchain sevice, with use cases spanning across finance, logistics, retail, and energy sectors. The company is highlighting use cases that need to perform transactions quickly across multiple entities.
