News

Now Ready for Production: Amazon Managed Blockchain

• By David Ramel
• 05/08/2019

First unveiled in a preview last November, Amazon Managed Blockchain is now ready for production.

Blockchain technology is becoming increasingly popular, providing "an open, distributed ledger that can record transactions between two parties efficiently and in a verifiable and permanent way."

Amazon Managed Blockchain is a fully managed service designed to help users create and manage scalable blockchain networks using the open source framework Hyperledger Fabric. Support for another popular blockchain framework, Ethereum, is coming.

The service facilitates the management and maintenance of blockchain networks by helping users manage certificates, invite new members to a network, and scale out peer node capacity in order to more quickly process transactions, said AWS spokesperson Jeff Barr in a recent blog post.

"The blockchain networks that you create with Amazon Managed Blockchain can span multiple AWS accounts so that a group of members can execute transactions and share data without a central authority," Barr said. "New members can easily launch and configure peer nodes that process transaction requests and store a copy of the ledger."

The production-ready service is now available only in the Amazon cloud's US East (N. Virginia) Region. Pay-as-you-go pricing details are explained here.

AWS also offers the Amazon Quantum Ledger Database (QLDB), a "Fully managed ledger database that provides a transparent, immutable, and cryptographically verifiable transaction log. Owned by a central trusted authority." It was also announced last November and is still in preview.

Amazon Managed Blockchain doesn't require a trusted central authority.

When announcing the previews of both products last November, AWS said: "Amazon QLDB is a transparent, immutable, and cryptographically verifiable ledger for applications that need a central, trusted authority to provide a permanent and complete record of transactions (for example, supply chain, financial, manufacturing, insurance, and HR). For customers who want to build applications where multiple parties can execute transactions without the need for a trusted, central authority, Amazon Managed Blockchain makes it easy to create and manage scalable blockchain networks using the popular, open source Ethereum and Hyperledger Fabric frameworks."

The two services can work together, as AWS said: "Managed Blockchain can replicate an immutable copy of your blockchain network activity into Amazon Quantum Ledger Database."