Blockchain as a Service accelerates blockchain adoption

Blockchain as a Service (BaaS) is poised to play an important role in the information technology sector for many years to come.

In case you don’t know what Blockchain as a Service is, BaaS is when an entity (typically a cloud provider like AWS or Microsoft) sets up all the “blockchain foundational tech” for you. If you pay AWS or Microsoft for BaaS, you pay a company to set up blockchain connected nodes on your behalf. A BaaS provider like AWS or Microsoft would deal with the confusing back end for you or your business.

The first question we need to address is adoption. How big will blockchain get? How many companies will plan to incorporate blockchain technology? Is blockchain the foundational technology for the next generation of the internet or is it simply a passing fad?

Once we have understood the scope for how large blockchain technology is set to be, and once we have understood how many industries blockchain will disrupt, the need for BaaS becomes clear.

In my opinion, BaaS will serve as an essential catalyst for bringing about the adoption of blockchain technology. Taking the burden of difficulty out of the equation will allow a wide range of businesses and industries to adopt blockchain into their existing platforms.

BaaS does have to be implemented and does have some limitations though. BaaS is a means to an end. BaaS necessarily involves adding some centralization to blockchain, which is never ideal. The purpose of blockchain is to have decentralized solutions to centralized problems. Though BaaS does require one to rely on a centralized third party, it is a strong step towards bringing blockchain technology the world. To get to this point, we must first examine the blockchain hype.

Blockchain Is a Big Deal

Blockchain is beginning to weave its roots throughout the fabric of our society. According to Gartner: “As of February 2017, “blockchain” was the second most-searched-for term on Gartner.com, having increased in volume by 400% in the last 12 months.” There are dozens of industries that blockchain could disrupt and the big public cloud providers have launched BaaS offerings to help accelerate the adoption.

Since 2015, Microsoft has been adding BaaS modules to their cloud-computing platform, Azure and is focused on the Ethereum blockchain. In March, they announced additional solution templates 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.

Last month, AWS introduced AWS Blockchain Templates for Ethereum and Hyperledger Fabric which provides a fast and easy way to create and deploy secure blockchain networks using open source frameworks. With AWS Blockchain Templates, you can deploy Ethereum and Hyperledger Fabric frameworks using managed and certified AWS CloudFormation templates. AWS Blockchain Templates allows you also to focus on building your blockchain applications instead of spending time and energy on manual setup of your blockchain network. The AWS Blockchain Templates deploy the blockchain framework you choose as containers on an Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) cluster, or directly on an EC2 instance running Docker. Your blockchain network is created in your own Amazon VPC, allowing you to use your VPC subnets and network Access Control Lists. You can assign granular permissions using AWS IAM to restrict which resources an Amazon ECS cluster or Amazon EC2 instance can access.

IBM has also built their own BaaS service. It is a Hyperledger BaaS system based on the Bluemix Cloud Platform. They are focused more on private consortium blockchains.

BaaS Is Vital

When blockchain becomes "invisible", it will be useful. BaaS allows the blockchain part of the technology to be relatively invisible. It’s a step in the right direction. Allowing someone else to take care of the dirty backend of blockchain for you allows you or your business to benefit from blockchain technology without really having to deal with blockchain technology.

There are two options when interacting with the blockchain. You can either set up your node directly, and remove the invisibility cloak of blockchain, or you can have someone else do that for you. This is what BaaS is. It’s your second option.

The question is, how much demand is there for this option?

According to Etherescan, there are well over 23 million unique addresses on just the Ethereum blockchain right now. This gives you a decent idea of just how many people there are trying to interact with blockchain services.

According to Ethernodes, there are about 26,000 connected nodes to the ethereum blockchain. This means at most, there are 26,000 people who are directly connected to the blockchain.

Millions of people are interacting with the blockchain and they are doing it through BaaS. Blockchain is only expected to grow dramatically for individuals and commercial interests.

BaaS is an essential step. Without it, we won’t be able to bring blockchain mainstream.