Amazon Plays Its Own Game With Enterprise Blockchain

Amazon Web Services, the e-commerce giant's cloud computing arm, is having its proverbial blockchain cake and eating it, too.

With Amazon Managed Blockchain, AWS was clearly trying to take that one step further - but at the same time, the cloud services company isn't making any claims that all of its clients will benefit from using blockchain.

According to Rahul Pathak, AWS' general manager for big data, data lakes and blockchain, conversations with its customers led Amazon to the conclusion that blockchain isn't some kind of panacea, but is rather suited for specific business problems that many clients simply don't encounter.

"Some customers wanted an immutable ledger, but centralized trust was ok, and for that we have QLDB, and some wanted an immutable ledger, but also decentralized trust, and that's where Amazon Managed Blockchain came into play," Pathak explained.

AWS is stating that blockchain is not needed for the most touted enterprise blockchain use cases.

Their logos can be seen on the Amazon Managed Blockchain website.

If this is the thinking of other Amazon clients testing the new cloud service, and given that Amazon is now a dominant cloud service provider in the world, the product might be a formidable competition to the existing blockchain consortia, the first ones of which have recently gone live.

Curiously enough, Amazon has recently partnered with a number of blockchain solutions providers, but the new products have been developed exclusively by the AWS team, Pathak told CoinDesk.

Asked if there will be competition between Amazon's own service for building ethereum-based enterprise blockchains and Kaleido's, he said he didn't believe that was the case.

Lopez told CoinDesk that the partnership with AWS has been a productive one, helping create more than 1,500 blockchain networks with Kaleido's service at AWS. But the Amazon's own ethereum offering of the Managed Blockchain will be only "Five to ten percent" of the solutions clients need to run a blockchain, she said.