Azure Digitizing trust: Azure Blockchain Service simplifies blockchain development: Technology and applications. The world is rapidly globalizing to its digital stage, business processes are reaching numerous companies and several millions are being spent to effectively manage the workflows that cross boundaries of trust issues. Trust is very important in business and it is expected to grow with digital transformation as it expands beyond the walls of one firm and into processes shared with partners, customers and suppliers.
Our findings shows that the Microsoft’s specific goal is to aid both new and already existing companies succeed in this new era of secure multi-party computation. They intend to do this by delivering an open, accessible platforms, and services to every organisation including game publishers and grain processors. Companies can find it easier to make ISVs payments and international shippers can use the Azure to digitally transform the processes they share with others companies and clients.
Azure Blockchain Service is the base for blockchain applications in the cloud
A review of the Azure Blockchain Service shows that it is a fully-managed blockchain service that make things easier especially the formation, management, and governance of group blockchain networks. This is to help businesses to focus on their workflow logic and application development accurately. As of today, Microsoft has announce to the general public that the Azure Blockchain preview is now available to intending users.
Using this service does not require a professionalism because with a few simple clicks, users easily can create and deploy an authorized blockchain network. Users can still manage group policies using a native interface in the official Azure portal. The integrated controls allows developers to add new users, set authorizations, monitor network health stability and activity. With Azure Active Directory, they can also implement directed, private communications through integrations.
Some weeks ago, Microsoft also announced that they have partnership with J.P. Morgan to make Quorum first ledger available in Azure Blockchain Service. The Quorum is an accepted choice since it is built on the popular Ethereum protocol, which has biggest global blockchain developer community. Enterprise establishments requires confidential transactions, so it integrates with a rich set of open-source tools to meet the demand. Research shows that Quorum customers such as Louis Vuitton, Starbucks and Xbox Finance team can now easily use Azure Blockchain Service to swiftly enlarge their networks with lower costs, shifting their focus from infrastructure management to application development and business logic.
Farooq Umar, the Global Head of Blockchain at J.P. Morgan in his statement said that they are extremely pleased with the success Quorum has had in the last 4 years as companies around the world now use Quorum to specifically resolve complex business and societal difficulties. Going forward, he said that they are delighted to partner together with Microsoft as they continue to strengthen Quorum and increase experiences and services on the platform.”
He also went ahead to say that they are very enthusiastic to offer customers an enterprise-grade Ethereum stack with Quorum. They also look forward to adding new capabilities to the Azure Blockchain Service in the new months to come, including support for R3’s Corda Enterprise, improved application integration, and digital token management.
Azure Blockchain; An application-driven approach
According to the Microsoft website, the ledger is just the beginning for new applications. This is because, after configuring the fundamental blockchain network with Azure Blockchain Service, you must categorize your business logic using smart contracts. Previously, this method has been clumsy, needing numerous command-line tools and restricted developer IDE integration. Nowadays, the Azure blockchain is releasing an extension for VS Code to solve these concerns. As a matter of fact, this extension permits users to create and compile Ethereum smart contracts, launch them to either a consortium network or the public chain in Azure Blockchain Service. Also managing their code using the special Azure DevOps.
Immediately your network is created and smart contract state machines are launched, you must develop an application so that group participants can easily share data represented by the smart contracts and business logics. The major issue has been integrating these said apps with smart contracts so they either execute smart contract transactions or respond to smart contract updates. Therefore, it helps to connects business processes managed in other systems such as CRM, databases and ERP systems with the ledger. As can be seen, the new Azure Blockchain Dev Kit ensures that it is simpler than ever with connectors and templates for Logic Apps and Flow as well as integrations with serverless tools like Azure Functions.
As a beginner, you can even learn more about how to create your first network at first. Secondly you can code your smart contracts, and thirdly, you can interact with the ledger in the latest episodes of the web series Block Talk.
Acceptance of open communities
From the look of things as seen on the past years, Azure blockchain have been preparing their Confidential Consortium Framework (CCF) for public release. Microsoft says that CCF makes use of trusted implementation environments (TEEs) such as SGX and VSM. They use them to enable ledgers that integrate with it to complete confidential transactions with the throughput and latency of an integrated database. Also, privacy and high performance are main requirements of their enterprise clients. Microsoft is also thrilled to declare that they have finished the 1st version of CCF, which they integrated with Quorum. The best part is that they have made the source code available on Github.
Furthermore, it is believed that the paramount method to bring blockchain to their clients is by affiliating with the diverse and brilliant open source group of people that are driving blockchain innovation in the present day. Microsoft began this project in the year 2015, by affiliating with the developing communities around Ethereum, R3 Corda, and Hyperledger to make those technologies accessible in Azure Platform.
Ordinarily, instead of them to build their own ledger, or creating a ledger substitute, they decided to work hard to make open source technology developer’s work better with Azure platform and enjoy. In the light of this, all of the tooling that was released this week by Microsoft permits developers to work against both public Ethereum and consortium networks in Azure Blockchain Service.
In summary, it is revealed that Microsoft has embraced the open community of blockchain developers. This single act has brought the best of their cloud development tooling to the developers creating the next wave of dispersed applications. Finally, with the Azure Blockchain Service and Ethereum integrations for tools like VS Code, it is seen that Microsoft is demonstrating its commitment to open blockchain development. Do you have any comments and contribution? Use the comments section.
