Amazon Web Services (AWS) had not launched a blockchain service despite the huge hype around the trend, because the company didn’t understand what the customer need was for the product, CEO Andy Jassy told delegates at AWS reInvent 2018 in Las Vegas today.
As part of a number of product launches announced at the conference keynote, Jassy announced two blockchain products: QLDB and Amazon Managed Blockchain, after years of the company steering clear of launching its own fully fledged services in this space – and last year dismissing the need for the company to launch its own blockchain service.
“We genuinely didn’t understand what the real customer need is; the culture inside AWS is we don’t build things for optics, we only spend the resources to build things when we really understand the problem,” he said.
In the last part of 2017 and the first half of 2018, Jassy explained that AWS spent time speaking to hundreds of its customers about what they really wanted when they say they liked the idea of blockchain – trying to get an understanding of why these customers could not solve these problems using a database.
Jassy explained that there were two main reasons why organizations were interested in using blockchain, and both were slightly different; there were customers that wanted a ledger with a centralized trusted entity who had struggled to use existing blockchain frameworks because they didn’t scale well and because customers had to deal “with a lot of muck”. He said existing ledgers didn’t perform as well as they could as they were built for use cases where there was a need for consensus from various parties.
It now wants to help these customers to conduct transactions with centralized trust using a new database called Amazon Quantum Ledger Database (QLDB), which is immutable, cryptographically verifiable, transparent and fast, according to Jassy.
“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,” he said.
QLDB is essentially an external version of a service Amazon had built internally to track transactions for every data plane change to make operations and billing easier. A relational database didn’t work for this, and so the company built its own product that it is now taking to market.
The second type of issue Jassy referred to was the need for secure decentralized transaction processing, which Jassy once again suggested was currently “full of muck”. He said that AWS customers could run the two most popular blockchain frameworks – Hyperledger Fabric or Ethereum, using another new product – Amazon Managed Blockchain.
Amazon claims that the product allows users to set up and manage a scalable blockchain network “with just a few clicks”. The service removes the cost of creating the network and automatically scales to meet the needs of thousands of apps running millions of transactions, the cloud provider said.
originally posted on Forbes.com by Sooraj Shah
