The managed Azure Blockchain Service offer will disappear… in favor of a successor that Microsoft is developing with ConsenSys, still on a Quorum basis.
Azure Blockchain Service is not going to last long. The managed offer, which has been in preview since it opened to the public two years ago, will bow out September 10th. We can no longer create registers, nor add members to existing networks.
How does Microsoft justify its decision? Mainly because of the lack of interest in the product. We had indeed been able to feel a certain disaffection lately. In particular when reading the technical forums : a single subject launched since the beginning of the year. The latest public announcements of the American group were also starting to go up. The same goes for the updates of the development kit.
This disappearance should not leave a vacuum. Microsoft has paved the way for a successor. Still on Azure. And still based on Quorum, but in another, more functional implementation. In this case, that of ConsenSys, which controls the development of the protocol.
Microsoft had already partnered with ConsenSys to integrate its first “blockchain as a service” bricks on Azure. It was in 2015. Not on the basis of Quorum, which we weren’t going to start talking about than a year later, but from Ethereum. With the promise of being able to deploy (semi) private blockchains.
Not much is known about the future offering, except that it will be called Quorum Blockchain Service. We are promised – obviously – a “smooth” migration, supporting guide. In practice, it will be necessary, among other things, to synchronize at the level of the consortia to export the data. We can also wonder to what extent we will find, at launch, the same junctions as those which currently exist between Azure Blockchain Service and the rest of the Microsoft cloud.
The question of costs also arises. For now, Azure Blockchain Service pricing is as follows:
Main illustration © kugelwolf – Adobe Stock
