Overview of Blockchain in Azure

So welcome to the first clip of this video caused about Blockchain for Azure developers. Now, let’s focus on what’s available from an offering perspective in Azure for Blockchain. There are different components that are available. Let’s explore what is available in the Azure marketplace.

Azure offers a rich marketplace, where you can find different types of services that you can deploy in the Azure cloud. Specifically, we focus on the blockchain services. So you can see that there are some future capabilities for deploying Azure Blockchain service, Ethereum Manager, Hyperledger Fabric, as well as a capability for single node ledgers, ledgers that you will typically use for developing and testing purposes.

For larger capability, especially for production networks, obviously, you want to deploy a multi-node ledgers. Azure offers also tools for deployment, testing, development of smart contract, and will focus more specifically on the Azure Blockchain Workbench tool.

Let’s start by deploying Blockchain service. With Blockchain service, you can create a blockchain member that runs currently on the current ledger protocol. You can join an assistant consortium, or you can create your own. There are a few things that you have to enter as part of these templates, and then you’re done in a few minutes, with a fully-configured quorum blockchain network.

As part of the configuration, you want to select a resource group with all the resources necessary to run the blockchain network stored within Azure, the region of deployment– and there are a few regions that are currently supported– and then whether you want to join an assistant consortium or create your own. In this case, I’m going to create my own Azure consortium.

And as of now, the only protocol that is supported is quorum, which, at its core, is based on the Ethereum Blockchain. But more protocols will be supported in the near future. And the last details you’ll want to enter are about your name, and authentication credential, and the pricing model, which is basically the infrastructure that you’re deploying.

Then we are ready to create– that is, to deploy– this infrastructure. Once you have reviewed all your configuration details, and you’re happy with that, you’re ready to go and deploy. With Azure Blockchain service, you can build and deploy blockchain networks at scale. With this service, you can simplify the formation, management, and governance of consortium blockchain networks, so that you can focus on your business logic, your smart contract, and app development.

You get full node management. You can have governance on different consortium. You can join different consortium networks and have modular control on all the different members that access your blockchain network. Also, the Azure Blockchain service offers an open and accessible design.

What I mean is that you can integrate this flexible platform with any other dev tools or data sources and application that you already use in Azure or in other clouds. There are two types, or two tiers, of blockchain service that you can deploy in Azure. A basic one is a basic offering that is built for customers who want to explore Azure Blockchain mainly for development, for testing, or simply for proof of concept.

The standard tier is target for production blockchain solutions– providing high visibility, performance, all those attributes that are required for scalable blockchain solutions in the cloud. And also, you can integrate Azure Blockchain service with the serverless platform in Microsoft.

There are different connectors for flow or logic apps that you can use that will make easy for any developer to send data to and from the digital ledger, using a microservice, API approach, or database, or an event-driven platform. And lastly, for developers out there, you can integrate Azure Blockchain service with BS code and Azure DevOps.

So you have the full control on the smart contract lifecycle. There are extensions for VS code that you can use to write, test, debug and deploy your contracts locally, to a private chain, and to a public blockchain network. Then you can test. This test can be automatically generated and executed within the extension itself, so without leaving your development environment. Everything, you can do it in VS code and connect it to Azure DevOps. And you deliver a full DevOps pipeline for test automation, release pipelines, apply control access, policies as needed for your consortium network.

As you can see, it took less than 12 minutes to deploy our code on blockchain network. You can download the configuration details for the deployment. And, obviously, you can access the resources and have a look into the monitoring part of it in terms of how many transactions and mining nodes are available, and what was the traffic like in terms of transaction executed on the blockchain itself. Everything’s within the Azure portal.

So in this video, I’ve summarized how to deploy the new Azure Blockchain service. In the next video, we’ll focus on another service– the Ethereum platform– deployed on the Azure portal.