Everyone, predominantly banking & financial services companies, seems to be interested in Blockchain technology and that’s what the tech giant ‘Microsoft’ is offering on its Azure cloud platform.
Partnering with Consensus Systems (ConsenSys), Microsoft is all set to target the financial service industry with its Ethereum Blockchain as a Service (EBaaS).
If you’re not familiar with the term Ethereum, don’t you worry! You’re in the right place. To gain insight into Ethereum, how it works, what it does and its potential impacts, firstly, you must learn the core properties of Ethereum
Ready? You must be. Let’s get started!
Ethereum: A Brief Introduction
Ethereum is the leading programmable blockchain launched in 2015. It is a fully autonomous decentralized platform that is not controlled by anyone. Using this platform, programmers can write code that controls money and develop applications that can be accessed from any corner of the world.
Ethereum has a solid presence in the information technology sector, which Microsoft has realized in time and their Ethereum endorsement cannot be underestimated in any sense. Making this big move, Microsoft Azure is all set to make their already dominant existence stronger.
Ethereum Blockchain as a Service and Microsoft Azure
Ethereum Blockchain as a Service (EBaaS) is offered on the Microsoft Azure platform that gives an opportunity to create blockchains applications on the Ethereum platform. It supports a metadata-driven architecture (MDDA) and no-code development method that allows programmers to quickly build single-page applications to manage business data. Each and every aspect of enterprise application are defined using varied models including Workflow model, Data model, Data validation rules, Form layout, Full-text search indexing with Elasticsearch, User interface layout, Access control policy, ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) model, Report templates and XML schema, and Messaging.
While Bitcoin is enriched with great features, Cryptocurrency being the most popular, users were in constant search for something that is more flexible and extensible. Ethereum gives a perfect finale to this search while modernizing a lot of processes that were, in one or the other way, stuck in the past. It is open, flexible, and extremely customizable according to customer’s needs, provides ample room for innovation and gives access to various new services and distributed applications (Dapps).
Using this technology with Azure, clients of Azure Enterprise and developers will be able to create their own private blockchains (using a single-click cloud based blockchain developer environment), or automatically execute small contracts’ agreement terms in a matter of just 20 minutes, with no prior experience required. It’s just that easy! Ethereum also serves as an ideal platform for building distributed ledger applications.
Initial Offerings:
BlockApps Strato, a toolkit to develop Ethereum-based applications. It is basically a private blockchain sandbox for developers to experiment with their applications before releasing them into the Ethereum blockchain or any other platform.
Ether.Camp, another blockchain explorer tool enabling businesses on Azure to develop their own blockchain solutions. Features that will grab attention are corporate accounting with enhanced transparency, cross-border payments, self-executing smart contracts, securities trading and many more.
A few reasons why you should choose EBaaS platform:
- Free and Easy: An excellent option for those who are not well-acquainted with programming and coding. The free version comes with an embedded database that can be readily used by the developers right after installation.
- Single Page Application: If you’re in search of a platform that supports web-based enterprise applications with SPA architecture, then EBaaS is the answer. Also, it offers a clear separation of front-end and back-end.
- Object-relational Mapping: If writing SQL queries is one thing you’re struggling most with, EBaaS can do this for you. Object-relational mapping (ORMs) makes writing code easy-peasy.
- No code development: With the EBaaS platform, building a complete working enterprise application becomes easy, even if you’re a non-professional developer. It comes with a set of tools that simplify the development and modification of software solutions.
- Multi-Tenancy: With a multi tenant environment, it is possible for multiple customers to share the same application that runs on the same operating system. EBaaS installation supports this architecture where a single instance of software application can serve multiple customers.
- Model Interpretation: The different designs in MDDA are code generation and model interpretation. The EBaas platform is based on model interpretation design, which is easy to maintain and deploy and enables changes in runtime without stopping applications.
Wrapping-Up
The above description ensures the ability of the EBaaS platform to meet the challenges and complexities associated with enterprise application development. Together, Microsoft Azure’s new service EBaaS allows a platform for its customers to play and learn in a ready-made development cum testing cum production environment making Azure a great platform for Blockchain applications. Adding to this, capabilities like Power BI, Cortana Analytics, Azure Active Directory, O365 and CRMOL can also be integrated with the apps to derive an entirely new generation of decentralized cross-platform applications.
