Blockchain and cloud computing are two booming technologies that are set to be some of the most promising in the coming years. There are studies in which some analysts estimate that by 2025 more than 51% of the IT budgets of companies will be allocated to public cloud providers, such as AWS, Google or Azure. And for its part, it is expected that investment in blockchain in 2026 will be around $67.4 billion, because it is a technology that has great utility in sectors such as banking or cybersecurity.
The large cloud service providers have been working in recent years to merge these technologies, and some of them have developed interesting proposals to integrate blockchain within AWS or Azure, which is called “blockchain as a service“, which allows integrating blockchain within the cloud service provider. In the case of AWS, there is the Amazon Managed BlockChain service that integrates with services such as EC2, S3, Kinesis or EMR to interact with the blockchain, or you can also add AWS analytics services and obtain real-time visualizations of the blockchain data. On the other hand, AWS also provides us with the QLDB service, which is a database whose data is immutable and cryptographically verifiable, which means that the complete history of the data is stored and can be consulted in a transparent and integral way, preventing the information from being corrupted.
The question is: Isn’t the main advantage of a Blockchain its decentralized nature? Why then do we need a provider that offers these services? Well, there is the so-called Blockchain-Trilemma, which, in short, tells us that the three properties of a Blockchain (scalability, security and decentralization) are mutually exclusive, so an implementation cannot have all these properties at the same time. When we look at the main characteristics of the most important cryptocurrencies, this problem becomes more evident and we can see more clearly which properties were chosen for their development.
Today, one of the main drawbacks of blockchain is scalability, since we cannot have large amounts of information in the chain, because all the data must be replicated in all the nodes and when it comes to doing so, it can be a process that takes too much time. Besides, such data can never be deleted.
So, for what uses could we integrate both technologies?
Some of the use cases for Amazon Managed BlockChain could be:
- Decentralized Finance (DEFI).
- Payment history.
- NFTs.
- Logistics traceability.
- Financial systems
- Identity, e.g. passports, ID cards…
- Tracking of electoral counts.
Another of the main uses is what are called DApps, or decentralized applications, in which there is no company or entity that regulates communications between users or stores information about them or about the users. It is a network in which its users have total control over its operation. The first DApp that existed using blockchain was Bitcoin itself.
Although, as we have seen, for the moment, the cases of using blockchain integration with cloud providers are limited, but investment in these will continue to increase and companies such as AWS, Google or Azure will continue to bet on merging both and break the limits we have with blockchain, because its use in sectors such as health, security or logistics will increase considerably in the coming years.
Sources:
- https://www.infoworld.com/article/3650768/it-spending-will-soon-shift-to-mostly-cloud.html
- https://buybitcoinworldwide.com/blockchain-statistics/
- https://dev.to/jessica_veit/blockchain-based-cloud-computing-2-baas-by-aws-3c46
- https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/blockchain-technology-market-90100890.html
- https://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/blockchainasaservice-baas.asp
Cloud Engineer en Keepler: “As a technology lover, I have an innate desire to always be learning, improving, researching... and, of course, teaching. Currently, I am immersed in the world of software development oriented to Big Data technologies.”
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