Microsoft Announcing Ethereum Blockchain as a Service (ETH BaaS) on Azure Cloud

Transcript

[Music] good morning I'm excited to be here this morning um and to uh guide you through what I see as a exciting development so I'm here to introduce you or better yet let Cortana introduce you to the uh Galaxy's largest playground for blockchain developers so Microsoft Azure is a

hyperscale uh Global Cloud platform that has the fundamentals to provide you for infra infrastructure services like virtual machines and storage and networking but so much more more uh Microsoft when began the cloud Journey we actually overshock uh the marketplace and developed and focused our attention on platform as a service essentially building a fabric of apis uh that don't have any dependence on particular VMS and instances rather you just declaratively program what it is your intentions uh so we have a a huge portfolio of these platform services that you see here now why am i showing you these platform Services instead of

focusing on VMS uh platform services are the future uh worrying about your VMS and uh you know what their sizes are and their capabilities are really a thing of the past uh we are rather getting to a point where you're declaring uh in software what your hardware dependencies and needs are so uh with this uh for blockchain developers I'm just going to point out a couple of these this is a an ey chart slide and believe me this ey chart slide has been condensed and simpli if it's a much a larger ecosystem but you can see some of these services like notification hubs machine learning uh which we have uh rebranded into Cortana analytics um brings machine

learning to the masses and makes it um achievable uh and surfacing uh machine learning capabilities for prediction markets uh around the world the event hubs the key Vault uh so crypto is very important we offer a key VA that has a a unique service we think will be of interest in this community and then active director where we talk a little bit about uh identity and Federated identity how do we first establish identity uh and how do we allow you to have composite identities uh that is a very important thing and when I talk about Azure I'm going to talk about size for a minute so uh this is but one building this building is very large I don't know if you can see the scale here

oops well I I can't pinch in Zoom because it's uh projecting but anyway you can see the cars over there this is one building in a typical data center in Azure each data center the new data centers have four of these buildings connected at each location we are adding a million cores uh that's our run rate uh and a very we would every time I say it's a million cores a year we we up that so we're growing uh very very rapidly in this space now again this this is just one data center uh one quarter of a data center now these Data Centers do span the globe so when we talk about what's there we are talking

about hyperscale Global Network um the ones in green that are highlighted those are coming online later this year but you can see we basically covered uh cover the world um and where we find a need particularly if it's regulatory um we and there's a a demand from our customers will plop a data center in there uh we have data centers in China um we have data centers coming into Canada uh this year um now Azure is an open Cloud it is the most open Cloud I would argue um we are not the old Microsoft this is the new Microsoft uh we Embrace open source uh we actually contribute a great deal to

some of the most uh Innovative uh features that are coming with Cloud I'm going to talk about ones that I think are very strategic to what we're trying to do here um with ethereum and our partners so all of this is available to you in Azure so you pick and choose the flavor of os that you want or forget about the OS pick and choose the database the platform the blockchain um the UI whatever whatever your Dev tools are will support it so uh again this is hyperscale Enterprise cloud and before the red hat announcement which was last week I believe uh we announced Red Hat

availability uh for our Enterprise customers and really anybody one in four of our VMS were Linux uh we expect that to about double to be about half of our VMS will be Linux based uh running in the cloud now I would be remiss in talking about Regulatory Compliance uh for those of you that Target Enterprise customers they do tend to care about this stuff we are the most compliant Cloud uh and have the largest portfolio of certifications in the world uh none of our competitors can attest to this there's one up put a question mark about the Safe Harbor um we'll see what happens there uh but uh I I guarantee you if there is a certification to be had we will get it um if there is a

regulatory hurdle to jump we will jump it um there will not be a blocker uh for Azure moving forward so what is blockchain as a service what are we intending to do so the first thing we're doing at uh the Enterprise level so we're targeting primarily our Enterprise customers but really this benefits the entire development Community uh we are creating a set of services that allow our customers to fail fast most of our Enterprise customers cannot afford to take the jump particularly into ethereum or blockchain and use a parachute when they jump out the plane they need to fall fast and hit the ground fast if they're going to fail fail early uh and then get back up and

try it again now how do they do that with it infrastructures and budgets and constraints it's expensive they're too slow we want our customers and our developers to be able to experiment rapidly at low cost to spin up resources on demand uh and experiment by mixing and matching different Frameworks different platforms different tools to create the most awesome ethereum based applications on the planet so uh we talk about creating private ethereum environments uh how do they do that rapidly uh supporting the public network going back and forth uh and eventually you know we're creating that platform to evolve as this

technology evolves uh to be able to make sure that the services that you need are there so the biggest hurdle I always hear from customers is getting started and I remember July 31st when Frontier came out I spent the better part of two days sitting in my office trying to get the damn thing up and running uh and I unfortunately I was using Windows which is even worse once I switched to auntu I was a little bit more successful uh but uh we'll try to fix that by the way U uh um but anyway uh so we want to make it very easy so oneclick deployment now what does that mean so in Azure if you have not seen Azure I'm going to show it

to you in a moment so the azer has a portal that our developers and it Pros go to to create and manage resources that are going to be used in the cloud so we are going to be introducing um this is what I call a soft launch because this is a developer audience you guys will forgive me if I show you GitHub and things like that if I did a hard launch it would be all polished and marketing and we wouldn't show you any uh I would not definitely show you uh an SSH shell uh or anything anything like that um but here we're going to show what the vision is and then I'm actually show you what it looks like at this moment but this blockchain category will be up here now you'll notice we have some pre-populated uh items up here and we're talking about the blockchain as a

service particularly the ethereum blockchain as a service or Fass um provided by consensus so consensus is launching today uh two uh basic packages uh in this Marketplace uh the marketplace will consist of a uh PR private loop back if you will private blockchain environment based off of the go implementation with one click you will install a private Network that has a pre uh fueled ether account so you can go ahead and Our intention is to have someone a newbie and these Enterprise customers to with one click be able to deploy and get up uh and stand up an ethereum environment follow a simple script and write their first smart

contract application within 20 minutes if you told me that on the 31st i' probably come to tears because of the amount of time I spent on learning how not to do it uh so we want to make it much easier now we en we envision our customers picking from this menu and this menu when it says blockchains we kept it unique because we want services that um apply even if you're not providing a full blockchain stack if you're not doing this the C++ implementation or the go implementation or the Java implementation but you have a service that you have written that is specifically designed to work with ethereum networks you should publish it here to make it

discoverable um so we're we're creating this category and you can see you could go through any one of these and I'm going to walk you through what it looks like but if you wanted to have a private blockchain for instance had six nodes one node in the east coast of the United States one in Europe one in China One in Japan and one in Singapore you could do that all within filling out one Wizard and click deploy and you'd be up and running within minutes that's amazingly powerful so let me show you what this looks like really quickly um the marketplace real uh fast if I can come up and let me not have it extend to my screen so this is what the Azure portal looks like I'm using the Batman theme uh

it does come in black um so I'm going to come in here and I'm just going to say new and I'm going to create a new uh let's say auntu just you know because that's what I've been using lately I'm going to create here and show you what this looks like now I'm not going to go through this process because I'm showing you creating a VM for auntu that's not exciting I'm going to let uh I'm going to show you what it's going to look like to create uh one of these blockchain assets but I did want to point out a couple of things let me uh pick a different region and just show you how badass a machine I can create let's say I'm you know really going to be aggressive with this and I want to say create

a let's see how much money I want to spend there we go this looks good 32 cores and 448 gigs that looks good to me so you can see I can pick and choose from a menu of these type of resources and and uh go ahead and just type in a host name that's not going to work that's not going to work either anyway there's a I can't use uh spaces there's a space in there but anyway I can configure this and say go and then we'll go out and provision this and create it now for the quick starts you're going to see when I told you that um for the uh ethereum blockchains we have not stood up the

blockchain category yet that will happen probably by the end of the month uh but what you do see this is the Azure Marketplace I'm just going to t uh touch on this blockchain Strat which are actually going to show you next and I'm going to show you the oneclick deploy of what it looks like um for deploying blockchain uh so I'm going to create this block block app Strat image now this is based on a boont tu and it has the full stack here we got a lot of azure logins so I'm going to log in really quick and it's going to fire up yeah yeah comeing as me and it's going to fire up right into uh the template for me to fill in my parameters for my new blockchain uh

environment that I want to spin up so as we come up and this is live I'm not chewing a video or anything here I'm going to name this you he whoops let me go back so I'm going to type in some stuff here I'm going to go on the dev Network and put in a password and then say okay and it'll spin up and create it now I'm going let these guys actually do actually going to do it live let me switch back to my slides really quick and give you the big picture so let's talk about the the technology I think it's going to change the way we deliver these types of services and deliver this value the first is uh is

containers so namely Docker and windows containers they're basically um interchangeable at this point the amount of work we've done with Docker to make um container technology ubiquitous across Linux and windows distributions uh and be uh have a single management platform and deployment platform working with the Apache Foundation we have created an environment where you can mix and match VMS and containers to get the right environment for you at the drop of a hat and be able to change things almost instantly uh and deploy in scale uh based on your needs and demand and remember this is azure and if you're not familiar with Azure Azure is a

subscription service you only pay for what you use it's not like getting a cable TV package or getting a cell phone package you're only going to pay for what you use so when we have these containers um so um a container if you're not familiar with Docker it runs within a VM or it can run on the hypervisor itself we are creating an image repository and these image repositories are going to have containers that have prepackaged like say um a stack for ethereum uh a particular stack and you can have 10 20 30 different types of stacks that you can mix and match select those from the image repository and then spin up on your platform um the the stack that

you're that you're wanting to build upon now where this leads us is to this broader vision for blockchains so the ethereum blockchain is a service Vision with containers and the ability to dynamically spin up these type of resources we envision an era of microservices so microservices uh we are really decomposing is U let me go back to the talks yesterday the capability so that you can quickly compose Solutions um and be able to look at these different capabilities in this service fabric um and be able to begin developing blockchainbased applications consuming and exposing these other additional value added

services such that the blockchain um develop in the ecosystem becomes a much richer environment for our Enterprise customers so my question for you is uh as you look at this type of environment uh and noting that in the back if you grab one of those big posters it has a $200 certificate it's like winning the lottery you get that big check that actually you can't do anything with you actually don't have to take the poster but everyone that's in attendance will have the ability to get a $200 credit for Azure um to be able to evaluate this and uh start building your apps and looking at building ethereum apis blockchain apis crypto Services whatever you can dream of uh to build on

this platform and my question to you is what will you add thank you [Applause]