The blockchain is trying every day to create new industry and enterprise applications. It will take a long time for this technology to become ubiquitous. In the future, startups, academic institutions, open source organizations, alliances and financial institutions will all participate in this technology. At present, technology giants such as IBM and Microsoft seem to have captured this trend at the earliest.
IBM and blockchain are building a new area - Blockchain-as-a-Service (BaaS, Blockchain-as-a-Service). According to foreign media reports, the two companies have recently invested heavily in blockchain investments for corporate services. These enterprise service projects use cloud service infrastructure to reduce the back-end work of enterprise blockchain development. In February of this year, IBM released the IBM Blockchain service. Recently, IBM once again released a secure blockchain network for developers.
Both Microsoft and IBM have also promoted independent open source projects: The IBM and Linux Foundation launched the Hyperledger Project in December 2015; Microsoft launched Project Bletchley in June of this year. Recently, Marley Gray, head of blockchain, director of BizDev, director of Microsoft Cloud and Enterprise Strategy (Strategy for Cloud & Enterprise), and Arvind Krishna, senior vice president and director of IBM Research, received an interview with foreign media PCmag and discussed each Cooperation projects in the field of BaaS platform and open source blockchain, as well as forecasting the trend of the technology.
Blockchain is a distributed ledger technology used to record transaction data. It has technical advantages such as non-defective modification, complete distribution, and traceability. Applications include Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other cryptocurrencies, as well as smart contracts and various online assets. Data and transactions.
Blockchains can be either private or public. Bitcoin is the most famous case of the first public chain - miners from around the world work together to build a transaction block to increase the anonymity appeal of the global equipment network as a decentralized node infrastructure while maintaining the blockchain (And cryptocurrency) Data security that cannot be tampered with.
On the other hand, companies increasingly invest in the development of private chains. In the blockchain, many blocks use the same distributed ledger technology to store transaction data, but only private companies can access it in a private cloud service platform or virtual environment.
Why do companies want private chains? Think of a blockchain as the underlying architecture of any enterprise application or service, whether it is a system that handles banking and financial transaction systems or an infrastructure of intranet collaboration or databases. With a blockchain, any business process and transaction can be synchronized to an unchangeable ledger, and thus permanently guaranteed for transparency, accountability, data integrity, and so on.
What is important is that the private chain is where BaaS comes from. Public chains rely on P2P node networks and machine equipment to maintain and enhance decentralized infrastructure, making blockchains more groundbreaking, such as Bitcoin. In other words, private chains require a lot of manual development work and powerful back-end cloud computing capabilities before they can establish and maintain distributed infrastructure. As a result, technology giants such as IBM and Microsoft have developed a cloud infrastructure platform that includes a variety of developer tools that can more easily provide companies with blockchain applications and help businesses reduce their burden. This blockchain uses platform-as-a-service (PaaS, Platform-as-a-Service). Both IBM and Microsoft try to integrate multiple cloud services on the infrastructure.
BaaS contests blockchain
Technology giants know that blockchain-based companies will have huge market potential in the future. Both IBM and Microsoft hope to help build a secure, trusted, and interoperable open blockchain. Even Amazon wants to participate in this competition. The company developed the BaaS sandbox on the Amazon Web Services with Digital Currency Group at the beginning of the year.
Microsoft’s vision is to provide businesses with all the necessities to build a blockchain in the cloud, including the Microsoft Azure platform’s back-end infrastructure, Microsoft Visual Studio’s developer tools, templates, resources, etc., making the process simple and accessible. Operation, the most important thing is safety.
Microsoft Gray said, “We understand that the common pain points in the blockchain are identity management and key management: what should you do? Privacy is the second pain point. The third pain point is with existing systems and other blockchains. Interoperability between. One person blockchain can not solve all problems, we need a lot of blockchain."
Microsoft insists on standing in the Ethereum camp. It is understood that in the Azure Developer Lab environment, developers can build, test, and deploy blockchain-based applications in the Azure cloud. In addition, developers can also use Visual Studio's integrated development environment (IDE) to integrate more comprehensive analysis and monitoring functions and tools for blockchain applications such as Cortana Intelligence Suite, machine learning, and Internet of Things services.
Gray said: "In the face of any industry there are idle business processes that should be significantly adjusted. Blockchain data services are a great opportunity. We can capture a lot of cross-domain historical data and use machine learning to analyze it."
IBM considers multidimensional in consideration of blockchain development. For example, in IBM's z Systems, the company sees blockchain application development as an additional feature on its server technology and is part of the open source parallelism on the Superbook project. Krishna explained that the key here is to integrate blockchains into existing systems without forcing banks, governments, and other institutions to abandon their traditional technologies, because strong sales will only backfire and delay the promotion of blockchains. year.
"Blockchain technology is relatively cutting edge. Even if GitHub gets some versions of code and installs, because many codebases are not perfect, it is difficult to successfully run the blockchain. For developers, the development and operation of the application will change. It's complicated. We want to make this particularly easy, and we plan to do our best to give developers a one-click access to the Bluemix DevOps environment and blockchain network,†Krishna said. IBM will begin deploying the blockchain within this fall. application. In addition, IBM decomposed the blockchain development of enterprises and developers into a complete cloud-based platform service. Krishna also said that the purpose of operating the blockchain on the IBM Bluemix cloud platform is to help developers and IT personnel streamline blockchain development and operations. IBM's secure blockchain service based on the LinuxONE server system adds more firmware protection and root access restrictions to blockchain applications and data - such a "high security corporate network" is a system regulation that promotes a highly regulated industry Another step in the process of embracing the blockchain.