On March 19, 2018, Microsoft announced that it will be making major enhancements to the Ethereum on their Azure platform, which will make readily available a group of blockchain networks suitable for usage in enterprise situations.

Ethereum Solutions for Cloud-Based Azure

These novel developments will improve reliability, analytics, and simplify the deployment to Ethereum on Azure. This upgrade includes an increased blockchain network presence, along with monitoring and operational support.

Blockchain solutions are currently being explored by enterprises all around the world for their applications in various industries. These developments from Microsoft could help businesses to take full advantage of the numerous opportunities that distributed ledger technology offers.

According to a blog post made by Cody Born, a software engineer at Azure Global, customers have become extremely interested in the blockchain solutions offered by the Azure Marketplace.

Born explains how a reliable network and health monitoring are essential for creating production blockchain cases and that these enhancements to Azure ‘s Ethereum will help develop better networks for enterprise use.

Born went on to explain:

“These solution templates are designed to make it faster and easier to deploy and configure a multi-member consortium Ethereum network with minimal Azure and Ethereum knowledge.

With a handful of user inputs and a single-click deployment, each member can provision their network footprint using Microsoft Azure compute, networking, storage, and other services across the globe.

Each member’s network footprint consists of a set of load-balanced transaction nodes with which an application or user can interface with to submit transactions, a set of mining nodes to manage consensus, and a VPN gateway for cross-tenant connectivity.

Our deployment guide illustrates how to setup the VPN connection to link the gateways and create a fully configured multi-member Blockchain network.”

Blockchain Developments on Azure

Microsoft Azure, previously known as Windows Azure, is a cloud computing service which allows IT experts to use, build, install and manage apps via data centres from Microsoft’s global network.

The Ethereum Blockchain as a Service (EBaaS) on Microsoft Azure was developed as a result from Microsoft and ConsenSys’ collaboration, with the purpose of enabling enterprise clients and developers to access with ease a click cloud-based environment for blockchain development.

The Microsoft Azure cloud is focused primarily on the financial services industry, and the EBaaS is looking to let companies begin working with the technology without them needing to make major hardware investments.

The Azure platform does not have Ethereum as its only partner, being linked to custom blockchain platform Lisk, cryptocurrency exchange Bitshare and blockchain tech companies Factom and Syscoin.