Amazon Web Services (AWS) is finally getting into the blockchain game, with CEO Andy Jassy announcing two new blockchain-related services during his keynote at the company's annual re:Invent conference, in Las Vegas.
Jassy explained the company received a lot of queries since re:Invent last year as to why it had not yet launched a blockchain service. "People assumed that we didn't think blockchain was important, or that we were not going to build a blockchain service, which wasn't true."
He said that in the past, when talking to customers, the company "hadn't seen that many blockchain examples in production, or which couldn't pretty easily be solved by a database".
"We genuinely didn't understand what the real customer need is and the culture inside AWS is we don't build things for optics. We only spend the resources to build things where we understand what problem you are really trying to solve and then we build it to solve it for you."
Jassy said AWS spent the later part of 2017 and the first part of 2018 talking to hundreds of customers about what they really wanted in terms of blockchain.
Based on what it learned from customers, AWS has now launched two blockchain-related services: Amazon Quantum Ledger Database (QLDB) and Amazon Managed Blockchain.
Amazon QLDB "provides a high-performance, immutable, cryptographically verifiable ledger for applications where multiple parties work with a centralised, trusted authority to maintain a complete, verifiable record of transactions," AWS said.
AWS teams have been using Amazon QLDB internally for years, according to Shawn Bice, VP of non-relational databases at AWS.
"Earlier this year, when we started talking to customers about what they needed from a blockchain solution, we realised the Amazon QLDB's ledger technology met a lot of their requirements," he said.
Amazon Managed Blockchain, on the other hand, is a fully managed blockchain service "that makes it easy and cost-effective to create, manage and scale blockchain networks for multiple parties to transact in a decentralised manner without the need for a centralised, trusted authority".
The service enables scalable blockchain networks to be created and managed using the popular open source frameworks Hyperledger Fabric and Ethereum. Jassy said Hyperledger Fabric is available as of yesterday and Ethereum will be available in a few months.
AWS claims that with "just a few clicks" customers can set up a blockchain network that can span multiple AWS accounts and scale to support thousands of applications and millions of transactions.
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