[ad_1]
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has been notoriously resistant to blockchain adoption, despite the fact that distributed register technology is now almost a decade old. At AWS re: Invent 2018, the company announced two blockchain services, which allow users to create a blockchain or private blockchain implementation for potential business use cases.
The first of these, the Amazon Quantum Ledger Database (QLDB), is a fully managed accounting database with a central trusted authority. The second, Amazon Managed Blockchain, allows users to create and manage blockchain networks using Ethereum or HyperLedger templates.
Here is an exhaustive briefing on how the blockchain differs from other transaction management and IT paradigms, how these offers influence the blockchain industry and potential use of blockchain in your organization.
SEE: Research: current status and forecasts for the future of the blockchain in the company (Tech Pro Research)
What is blockchain and how does it differ from a database?
Blockchain is a calculation model that allows the decentralized management of records in a permanent and verifiable manner. By design, it is intended to be tamper-proof: each block contains a cryptographic hash of the previous block that retroactively modifies the transactions in the blockchain impossible without altering all the blocks that followed it. For decentralized blockchains, this is a practical impossibility due to distributed network control.
The technology was developed by the pseudonym programmer Satoshi Nakamoto as the foundation of the Bitcoin cryptocurrency. Since then, other cryptocurrencies have been built on top of the concept, while some groups have explored the application of blockchain to other use cases. These include the management of transaction logs for traditional currencies, as well as more inventive uses such as land registration, smart contracts and federated social networking.
How are the two blockchain services on AWS different?
Amazon Quantum Ledger Database (QLDB) is marketed as a "fully managed general accounting database that provides a transparent, immutable and cryptographically verifiable transaction log of ownership of a central trusted authority".
Strictly speaking, there is no universally accepted definition of blockchain. The cryptographic hashing functions that make technology suitable for digital currency applications such as Bitcoin, when applied to use cases with a reliable central authority, make the technology little more than a computational database.
The value of QLDB is ease of implementation. With respect to the amount of work and computing nodes needed to deploy Hyperledger Fabric or Ethereum, QLDB simplifies the distribution of a general ledger database.
To combat, Amazon Managed Blockchain is a complete blockchain network that automatically resizes the resources needed to manage networks using the Hyperledger Fabric or Ethereum frameworks. According to Amazon, "manage your certificates, it allows you to easily invite new members to join the network and track operational metrics such as the use of processing, storage and storage resources" and allows users to replicate the instance Blockchain managed on QLDB to analyze trends and generate transactional metadata for statistical analysis.
Why are blockchain services on AWS important?
Strictly speaking, it has always been possible to implement blockchain on AWS, using a standard EC2 calculation instance. Andy Jassy, CEO of AWS, said in this regard: Invent 2018 that the company focused on understanding why customers want blockchain services instead of traditional databases, stating "Although we have a lot of customers who manage blockchain on of us … we had not seen that many examples of blockchain could not be solved by a database. "
Amazon's new offerings substantially simplify the process of deploying this technology on AWS, as custom tools for this purpose simplify resource scalability and resource billing management.
Do I need to use the blockchain or ledger database services on AWS?
C & # 39; is a very simple flowchart to implement blockchain.
QLDB occupies an awkward middle ground in terms of technology. The centralized nature of the service provides all the immutable properties that the blockchain has, even though these immutable properties mean that it has limited business practice application to justify the overhead and computational expense that accompanies a blockchain distribution.
If, in some way, there is a business use case that requires an immutable database because the product design potentially allows users to modify data or attributes of other users, there is a design problem. The launch of blockchain to this would not be useful or convenient. Likewise, if you have a design that can cause inadvertent data changes, you have a data recovery problem or version control. These are problems that can be solved easily with less engineering talent than is necessary to adapt these use cases to QLDB, at a lower operating cost.
If, for some reason, you have a business case that actually requires distributed control and reporting, as a simple example, imagine a system of federated rewards that allows customers to earn points through stores with different owners, with the reimbursement of the calculated reimbursement cost in proportion to the stores where the points were earned, the use of the blockchain would have been useful. The number of these cases of use is not abundantly high, but is different from zero.
Taking into account these disclaimers, if you are absolutely convinced that a company should use blockchain, the AWS implementation of general accounting applications or blockchain is probably the easiest way to implement it for your business, with that ease of Use enlarged if you are already using other AWS products in your organization.
See also
Image: iLexx, Getty Images / iStockphoto
