Amazon Web Services (AWS) has joined the bandwagon of firms experimenting with blockchain technology by launching two new products, while the company termed the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region including India to be growing “quickly”. The Amazon.com company also launched nearly 20 new products and upgrades, mainly for the cloud computing, to provide customers “database freedom”.

“We were asked why we weren’t doing anything on blockchain... We genuinely didn’t understand who a blockchain customer was, and the culture inside AWS was that we don’t build things for optics,” AWS Chief Executive Officer Andy Jassy said in his keynote address at re:Invent, an annual conference for the global cloud computing community. “We spent the last part of 2017 and the first part of 2018 talking to customers on blockchain and what they wanted,” he added.

AWS launched Managed Blockchain, to create and manage scalable blockchain networks, and Quantum Ledger Database (QLDB), a fully-managed ledger database with a central trusted authority. The Managed Blockchain supports Ethereum (an opensource platform to build and deploy decentralised applications) and Hyperledger Fabric (a Linux Foundation project for multiple blockchain technologies).

APAC, India growing quickly

“We are growing very rapidly in China, India, Middle East, Singapore and Australia. Enterprises in these countries are in the early stages of adoption of cloud technologies, and are behind by 36 months in realising the potential,” he said.

AWS also launched its own infrastructure hardware, AWS Outposts, which would be available from 2019. AWS Outposts, a technical partnership with VMware, will enable users to access a consistent set of hardware, software and services.

The Seattle-headquartered company also unveiled multiple cloud-based products such as Glacier Deep Archive, Amazon FSx for Windows file server, Amazon FSx, AWS Control Tower, AWS Security Hub and AWS Lake Formation among others.

rajesh.kurup@thehindu.co.in

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