Yesterday AWS said its Amazon Managed Blockchain is now available for the public Ethereum blockchain. The news comes a little under two years after its first Managed Blockchain offering for Hyperledger Fabric became widely available. It hasn’t launched any others.
The announcement comes more than five years after Microsoft Azure launched its first Ethereum blockchain service in late 2015. While AWS is still the dominant market leader in the cloud, there’s no question that Azure has been far more aggressive in its blockchain offerings and using blockchain to raise its profile.
We receive numerous blockchain announcements where Microsoft is stated as a partner when its role is hosting the blockchain solution.
Google Cloud is also getting more actively involved in public blockchain and DLT. It’s on the governing board of Hedera where it explained the purpose was to be a hosting provider. It’s also a hosting provider for the Theta video network and recently became a block producer candidate for EOS.
In today’s AWS announcement, the company cited decentralized finance (DeFi) as a major driver. Amazon says it addresses the concerns of DeFi developers, including “data reliability due to out-of-sync nodes, data storage scaling challenges, and time-sensitive Ethereum software upgrades.”
Doubtless, AWS must have needed to get more heavily involved with blockchain as a provider for China’s Blockchain-based Service Network (BSN), alongside Google Cloud. Surprisingly, Azure is not a partner. BSN provides a low cost hosting solution where developers don’t need to run a node but can just upload code. It has both a Chinese and a global network. The international version supports public blockchains such as Ethereum, EOS, Tezos and others.
