Amazon Launches New Blockchain Services

Amazon, e-commerce giant based in Seattle, Washington, sees numerous opportunities with blockchain technology. That’s why the company has launched two blockchain-related products: Amazon Quantum Ledger Database (QLDB) and Amazon Managed Blockchain.

Announcing Amazon Quantum Ledger Database (QLDB), a purpose-built ledger database that provides a complete & verifiable history of application data changes. #reInvent https://t.co/x2qjfCKJTU pic.twitter.com/hKFG05yUTs

— Amazon Web Services (@awscloud) November 28, 2018

Introducing Amazon Managed Blockchain, which is a fully managed service that makes it easy to create & manage scalable blockchain networks using popular open source frameworks Hyperledger Fabric & Ethereum. #reInvent https://t.co/I3HautETXJ pic.twitter.com/ILFPPgsIwU

— Amazon Web Services (@awscloud) November 28, 2018

Amazon Quantum Ledger Database

QLDB is a fully managed ledger database that provides a transparent, immutable, and cryptographically verifiable transaction log ‎owned by a central trusted authority. Using QLDB, customers can replicate a copy of their blockchain network activity. Amazon QLDB tracks each and every application data change and maintains a complete and verifiable history of changes over time.

The website states:

“Amazon QLDB is a new class of database that eliminates the need to engage in the complex development effort of building your own ledger-like applications. With QLDB, your data’s change history is immutable – it cannot be altered or deleted – and using cryptography, you can easily verify that there have been no unintended modifications to your application’s data. QLDB uses an immutable transactional log, known as a journal, that tracks each application data change and maintains a complete and verifiable history of changes over time.”

The product is easy to use, as it provides developers with a familiar SQL-like API, a flexible document data model, and full support for transactions. Moreover, you do not have to pay extra fees, you only pay for what you use.

Andy Jassy, Amazon Web Service CEO, said:

“It will be really scalable, you’ll have a much more flexible and robust set of APIs for you to make any kind of changes or adjustments to the ledger database.”

Amazon Managed Blockchain

Another product launched by the e-commerce giant is Amazon Managed Blockchain, “a fully managed service that makes it easy to create and manage scalable blockchain networks using the popular open source frameworks Hyperledger Fabric and Ethereum”. The product can operate with QLDB and allows users to adjust and manage a scalable blockchain network.

The company stated:

“Amazon Managed Blockchain eliminates the overhead required to create the network, and automatically scales to meet the demands of thousands of applications running millions of transactions. Once your network is up and running, Managed Blockchain makes it easy to manage and maintain your blockchain network.”

Putting an immutable copy of your blockchain network activity into Amazon Quantum Ledger Database, the managed blockchain allows you to easily analyze the network activity both outside and inside the network.

Amazon To Embrace Blockchain

The new products of Amazon were developed with a view to let customers set up “a scalable blockchain network with just a few clicks” that “automatically scales to meet the demands of thousands of applications running millions of transactions.” According to Andy Jassy, the initiative is a response to demand from existing customers. He said:

“We don’t build things for optics. This is something that a lot of companies need.”

Just a reminder, recently, Amazon started persuading brick-and-mortar merchants to accept its mobile payments system Amazon Pay. It is not clear how customers would use Amazon Pay in stores, but the possible way is utilizing QR codes, which could attract global customers and make Amazon even more competitive.

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