Amazon Managed Blockchain features

Getting started with Amazon Managed Blockchain is easy—you can launch a blockchain network in minutes without additional configuration. Then configure your network membership and launch blockchain peer nodes using the AWS Management Console. You can invite other AWS accounts to join your blockchain network, or you can create additional members in your AWS account to build a simulated network for testing.

When building permissioned blockchain networks, enabling existing members to vote on the addition (or removal) of new members can require custom development and permissions management. To make this easier, Amazon Managed Blockchain provides a voting API that enables members in a blockchain network to quickly vote on proposals for adding or removing new members.

Joining a public network is easy – you can choose the public network that you want to join and then provision a peer node using the AWS Management Console. Amazon Managed Blockchain provides secure networking, fast and reliable syncs to the blockchain network, durable elastic storage for ledger data, encryption at rest and transport, and secure access to open-source APIs.

With Amazon Managed Blockchain you can choose between two popular blockchain frameworks, Hyperledger Fabric and Ethereum, so you can choose the framework that best fits your needs.

Hyperledger Fabric is an open source blockchain framework from the Linux Foundation that enables you to write blockchain applications and offers access control and permissions for data on the blockchain. With it, you can easily create a private blockchain network and limit the transactions that each party can see.

Ethereum is a decentralized blockchain framework that establishes a peer-to-peer network that securely executes and verifies application code, called smart contracts. Smart contracts allow participants to conduct verified transactions without a trusted central authority. Transaction records are immutable, verifiable, and securely distributed across the network, giving participants full ownership and visibility into this data. Transactions are sent and received by Ethereum accounts that are created by users. A sender must sign transactions and spend Ether, Ethereum’s native cryptocurrency, as a cost for processing transactions on the network.

After creating an Amazon Managed Blockchain network, you can easily invite other entities to join your network. After accepting the invitation and setting up a membership, each new member of your blockchain network configures peer nodes that provide compute, storage, and memory to execute decentralized applications and maintain a copy of the ledger. If you need to scale an application, adding peer nodes can help process transactions more quickly. Managed Blockchain provides APIs that let you quickly create new nodes to meet the changing demands of your application. Also, Managed Blockchain provides a selection of instance families--bc.t3, bc.m5, and bc.c5--with varying combinations of CPU and memory so you can choose the appropriate mix of resources to support your workload.

Amazon Managed Blockchain uses AWS Key Management Service (KMS) technology to secure Hyperledger Fabric's certificate authority, a component that manages user identities and issues enrollment certificates for securely communicating within the blockchain network. With Managed Blockchain, you don’t have to worry about setting up your own security device, such as a hardware security module (HSM), for this purpose.

You can securely interact with your Hyperledger Fabric components managed by Amazon Managed Blockchain through Amazon VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) endpoints. Additionally, you can safely interact with blockchain peer nodes from other members in your network through this endpoint to endorse transactions.

Hyperledger Fabric’s default ordering service can use Apache Kafka to support the communication of transactions across the network. While Kafka meets the needs of providing a messaging platform that can deliver transactions sequentially across the network, it is not optimized to store a complete history of transactional data, making it hard to recover historical transactions in case of a failure. Amazon Managed Blockchain's ordering service is built using Amazon QLDB technology, which has an immutable change log and maintains the complete history of all uncommitted transactions in the blockchain network, making the ordering service more durable.