Amazon embraces blockchain with launch of new services

Amazon has announced two new blockchain-related services, Amazon Quantum Ledger Database (QLDB) and Amazon Managed Blockchain.

“AWS teams have been using Amazon QLDB for years to maintain a complete, immutable, and append-only journal of data changes. We started out trying to use relational databases to do this, but quickly found they could not scale or deliver the performance we needed to support our most widely-used services,” says Shawn Bice, Vice President, Nonrelational Databases at AWS.

“Earlier this year, when we started talking to customers about what they needed from a blockchain solution, we realised that the Amazon QLDB’s ledger technology met a lot of their requirements. They wanted a centrally-owned ledger that provided an immutable way to log the transactions history of their applications and was transparent to all the parties with whom they were interacting. So, today we’re offering an immutable, transparent, and cryptographically verifiable ledger, based on the same one that AWS teams have been using for years at scale, as a fully managed service.”

“Many of our customers want to build applications where multiple parties can execute transactions without a central, trusted authority, and they also need to create a blockchain network. Building a scalable blockchain network with existing technologies is just too hard today, and that’s why customers pay expensive consultants to help them,” comments Rahul Pathak, General Manager, Amazon Blockchain at AWS.

“Amazon Managed Blockchain eliminates the muck involved in setting up a network, adding and removing members, and scaling to meet application demands. Customers can use either Ethereum or Hyperledger Fabric, the two most popular blockchain frameworks, and get a functioning blockchain network set up with just a few clicks.”

Further details here.