Blockchain in the cloud: Microsoft and Amazon look to democratize the distributed ledger for developers
It was good to be back at Microsoft’s annual developer conference, Build, for the second time. The event started off with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella claiming, “the world is becoming a computer” and that the impact would be like that of the Industrial Revolution. It was interesting to see how Microsoft’s vision and focus has evolved since last year. Similar to last year, Microsoft emphasized the move to technology powered by the intelligent edge and cloud powered by AI, the Internet of Things (IoT), and new to the list this year: blockchain.
This new focus on blockchain was highlighted by the public preview of Azure Blockchain Workbench, a new tool with a goal of reducing the time it takes businesses to build blockchain applications on top of existing blockchain infrastructure.
Before I get into their blockchain products, what is a blockchain? Well according to billionaire investor Warren Buffett, Bitcoin, a cryptocurrency built on the blockchain, is “probably rat poison squared.” His harsh view isn’t rare: Amazon Web Services CEO Andy Jassy, discussing blockchain, has said that AWS does not “build technology because we think it is cool,” and JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon called Bitcoin “a fraud” claiming it is “worse than tulip bulbs,” referring to the tulip mania of the 17th century. (Dimon later said he regretted the statement.)
But for many, like myself, blockchain technology is not about the hype shown by the volatility of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin; it presents an opportunity to improve the world we live in, using smart computer science and innovative economics. Blockchain is the underlying technology behind many cryptocurrencies and is a distributed ledger that is immutable, allowing for transactions between two or more trustless parties to occur securely. Once blocks in the chain are verified, it is almost impossible to alter them after the fact.
To allow only authentic, authorized transactions and to avoid the double spend problem (an attack where someone attempts to send the same tokens to more than one person effectively spending more than they have), blockchains use a consensus algorithm such as Proof of Work in Bitcoin and Proof of Stake in others to decide which block to use in the chain of blocks when there are multiple contradicting blocks. This technology allows for secure, authorized transactions to occur, enabling many financial and non-financial use cases by business around the world.
Microsoft’s goal with Azure Blockchain Workbench is to enable developers who aren’t blockchain experts to be able to build solutions for those use cases.
“Workbench dramatically reduces development costs and accelerates time to value for developers, independent software vendors and integration partners alike,” said Matthew Kerner, a General Manager at Microsoft Azure.
