Jonathan Fritz presents a “Deep Dive on Amazon Managed Blockchain.” Before getting into the details of Amazon’s service, he addresses some of the basic concepts regarding blockchain.
Many business networks rely on central authorities, which can be inefficient, expensive and require time-consuming auditing.
An alternative would be a consortium, which could achieve better outcomes by sharing information. However, they may not agree on how data can be secured and fairly shared.
Multiple organizations need to independently verify transaction histories and need a single, up-to-date, accurate view of data.
Business logic among multiple organization could be simplified through automation.
Asset transfers require an expensive and inefficient escrow.
A public network needs a way to maintain a tamper-proof history of transactions and global state.
Blockchain resolves these points and eliminates the need for a central authority in business networks.
THREE MAIN BLOCKCHAIN COMPONENTS:
1) Distributed ledger (bottom layer)
2) Consensus mechanism
3) “Smart Contract” execution environment (top layer)
LEDGER DATABASE
The journal is the essence of a blockchain. The journal records an immutable log of all transactions and is maintained by nodes in the blockchain network.
CONSENSUS MECHANISM
This is how the network assures what data goes into the ledger and the data that it’s in their stays correct.
SMART CONTRACTS
Where the applications function and interact.
PUBLIC AND PERMISSIONED NETWORKS
Public networks allow anyone to participate. Members are incentivized to maintain the network.
Permissioned networks limit the members to known entities.
They both have applications in the world.
AMAZON MANAGED BLOCKCHAIN
AMB is a fully managed service that makes it easy to create and manage scalable blockchain networks using open source frameworks: Hyperledger Fabric and Ethereum.
This is a decentralized network and is not owned by Amazon and is low cost: you only pay for what you use.
HYPERLEDGER FABRIC (available now)
Creates permissioned networks with channels to limit the transactions on the ledger each member can see.
Has smart contracts, called Chaincode.
Validation policy for executing Chaincode and is configurable.
Has no native cryptocurrency.
ETHEREUM (coming soon)
Create smart contracts using the Solidity language that runs across nodes in the network.
Very scalable.
Create permissioned networks or use public Ethereum network.
Configured to use Proof-of-Work consensus algorithm for public networks and Proof-of-Authority for private networks.
Anyone who can access the network can see all data on the ledger.
IN BRIEF
Amazon Managed Blockchain is a fully managed blockchain service that makes it easy for customers to create and manage scalable blockchain-based transaction networks using the open source blockchain frameworks Hyperledger Fabric and Ethereum.
Blockchain technologies enable groups of organizations to securely transact, run application code and share data without a trusted central authority.