Microsoft Azure blockchain is the second-leading enterprise provider

With tech giants rushing towards blockchain technology, Microsoft opted not to rush to bring in the blockchain technology in its services. The major step was not including it in Azure cloud solutions. However, it started to gain traction with the launch of its own blockchain development kit along with the Azure Blockchain Workbench. By the way, if you are new to this concept of Blockchain and adoption of this technology by Blockchain application development services, read the following.

What is Blockchain?

It is transparent as well as a verifiable system which can change the way people actually think about exchanging their assets and value, along with enforcing contracts as well as sharing data. This particular technology is essentially a shared and secure ledge of a variety of transactions which are distributed among an entire network of computers instead of resting with one single provider. Companies are now using Blockchain as a basic common data layer in order to enable a brand new class of apps and software.

Also, business processes, as well as data, can easily be shared across different organizations which certainly eliminates waste, also reduces the risk of any fraudulent practices and even develop new revenue streams. It also opens up new avenues for blockchain app development services due to the growing demand of blockchain apps among the businesses. 

Why use Blockchain on Azure?

Well, Blockchain is used on Azure for a variety of purposes which are highlighted below:

1. Simplification of Development

It cuts down the development time as well as allow easy experimentation with pre-configured, modular networks as well as infrastructure.

2. Quickly Getting Up and Running

It allows iteration and validation of blockchain scenarios much quickly by using inbuilt connections to the Azure as well as tools that the users are familiar with.

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3. Confident Innovation

It allows the users to keep the data secure and easily scale when the user needs to be on a trusted, open, and globally available cloud computing platform.

Now, we have described why Blockchain is used by Microsoft Azure, let’s explore the types of solution architectures that it encompasses. Two of them which every blockchain development company should know are:

Types of Solution architectures

1. Microsoft Azure Blockchain workflow application

Different businesses utilize Blockchain in order to digitize their workflows which they actually share with different organizations like moving physical assets across multiple supply chains. Also, the anatomy of blockchain applications is quite similar across different use cases.

In this solution architecture, we utilize Azure Blockchain Service as the essential foundational managed and bedrock blockchain network and create a consortium app which can ingest signals from different relevant and vital user interfaces and even communicate ledger data to different consuming applications across the particular consortium. Its flow include the following

Flow

1. Various relevant applications, devices as well as data sources, send the events or the data to a particular message broker. In this case, it is the Azure Service Bus.

2. Then the distributed ledger technology, also known as DLT, consumer Logic App easily fetches the entire data from the above-mentioned Service Bus and then sends to a separate transaction builder which builds as well as signs the entire transaction.

3. Now, the signed transactions get directly routed to the Microsoft Azure Blockchain Service which is a fully-managed network of Ethereum consortium, through a ledger Logic app connector specific to the ledger.

4. Then blockchain data manager completely captures the block as well as the transaction data right from the configured transaction nodes, moves on to decoding events as well as properties and then finally sends the entire data to different configured destinations.

5. The message broker actually sends ledger data to different consuming business apps as well as the off-chain database.

6. Finally, the information is analysed as well as visualized utilizing tools like Power BI by means of connecting to an off-chain database.

2. Microsoft Azure Supply Chain Track and Trace

Among the most common blockchain patterns is IoT-enabled monitoring of different assets as it moves along a secure multi-party supply chain. The flow of this process is as follows:

Flow

1. Different IoT devices communicate with a pre-defined IoT hub. This hub as a route configured which will transmit specific messages to a particular Service Bus which is associated with that given route. Also, the message is still in its native format for the device and requires to be duly translated to the formed utilized by Azure Blockchain Workbench.

Also, an Azure Logic App duly performs that particular transformation. Then, it is triggered whenever a new message is actually added to the given Service Bus which was associated with the previously mentioned IoT hub and then it transforms the entire message as well as delivers it to the same Service Bus utilized to deliver messages to the particular Azure Blockchain Workbench. Also, the first Service Bus serves as an Outbox, effectively, for the IoT hub, and then the second one acts as an Inbox for the same Workbench.

2. The DLT Consumer fetches the respective data from the given message broker, which is the Service Bus and then sends the data to Signer, which is a Transaction Builder.

3. The Signer or the transaction builder then builds as well as signs the transaction.

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4. Then, the signed transaction gets directly routed to the Blockchain.

5. Now, DLT Watcher gets the confirmation of the entire transaction commitment to the particular Blockchain and then sends the confirmation to the Service Bus or the message broker.

6. The DB consumers duly send the particular confirmed blockchain transactions to different off-chain databases which is Azure SQL Database.

7. The entire information is analysed as well as visualized utilizing tools like Power BI by means of connecting to the particular off-chain database mentioned above.

8. Finally, the events from the given ledger are delivered to the respective Event Grid as well as Service Bus for utilization by downstream consumers. These include logic apps along with functions or even other code which is designed to take action on these events. 

While Microsoft Azure provides these above-mentioned types of solution architecture, it also offers supported distributed ledger platforms to build with the ledger that suits use case of your Azure application development company. For instances:

a. Corda 

Utilize this distributed ledger platform in order to deploy multi-node, multi-participant network along with a network map, peers as well as notaries.

b. Ethereum

Easily deploy a variety of different Ethereum network topologies through Azure Blockchain within minutes and manage nodes with various cross-region deployments along with VM scale sets as well as monitoring.

c. Hyperledger Fabric

Use Hyperledger Fabric network and get it up and running in few minutes to deploy services for ordering, membership and validating peers.

Conclusion

It is an established fact that Microsoft isn’t the first of the big tech companies to get into the blockchain game. IBM has made a great push in blockchain adoption, and AWS is also getting into this technology after ignoring it before. However, Microsoft Azure Blockchain is currently the second leading enterprise provider, and Microsoft is constantly trying to become the market leader in Blockchain-based Azure cloud solutions.