Microsoft Announces Developments to Ethereum on Azure
Microsoft announced on March 19, 2018, significant enhancements to the Ethereum on Azure offering, which will make production-ready consortium Blockchain networks suitable for application in enterprise scenarios.
One Click Cloud-Based Business Solutions: Ethereum and Azure
The developments will bring improved reliability, analytics, and simplified deployment to Ethereum on Azure. This upgrade includes high availability of blockchain network presence, simplified deployment experience and monitoring and operational support.
Fuller technical details are available to view on the Microsoft Azure blog.
Blockchain solutions have implications for almost every industry and are being explored by enterprises around the world. These developments from Microsoft could help businesses to take full advantage of the numerous opportunities that distributed ledger technology offers.
According to Cody Born, a software engineer at Azure Global and author of the blog post, customers are gaining interest in the blockchain solutions that the Azure Marketplace can offer.
Born suggests that network reliability and health monitoring are vital for building production blockchain cases and that these improvements to Ethereum on Azure will help achieve better networks for enterprise use:
“These solution templates are designed to make it faster and easier to deploy and configure a multi-member consortium Ethereum network with minimal Azure and Ethereum knowledge. With a handful of user inputs and a single-click deployment, each member can provision their network footprint using Microsoft Azure compute, networking, storage, and other services across the globe. Each member’s network footprint consists of a set of load-balanced transaction nodes with which an application or user can interface with to submit transactions, a set of mining nodes to manage consensus, and a VPN gateway for cross-tenant connectivity. Our deployment guide illustrates how to setup the VPN connection to link the gateways and create a fully configured multi-member Blockchain network.”
What Is Microsoft Azure?
Microsoft Azure, formerly known as Windows Azure, is a cloud computing service. It allows IT professionals to use, build, deploy and manage applications through Microsoft’s global network of data centers.
The Ethereum Blockchain as a Service (EBaaS) on Microsoft Azure resulted from a partnership between Microsoft and ConsenSys, with the goal of allowing enterprise clients and developers to have a single click cloud-based blockchain developer environment.
The Microsoft Azure cloud is aimed primarily at the financial services industry, and the EBaaS seeks to allow companies to begin working with the technology without having to make significant investments in hardware.
The Azure platform is not only partnered with Ethereum, but also has links to custom blockchain platform Lisk; decentralized exchange Bitshares; Syscoin, and Factom.
