AWS Announces Amazon Quantum Ledger Database (QLDB) and Amazon Managed Blockchain

Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company, announced two new services to help companies manage business transactions that require full auditability.

Amazon QLDB: A transparent, immutable, and cryptographically verifiable ledger database service

Amazon QLDB provides a high-performance, immutable, cryptographically verifiable ledger for applications where multiple parties work with a centralized, trusted authority to maintain a complete, verifiable record of transactions.

Amazon QLDB removes the need to build complex audit functionality into a relational database or rely on the ledger capabilities of a blockchain framework. Amazon QLDB uses an immutable transactional log, known as a journal, which tracks each and every application data change and maintains a complete and verifiable history of changes over time. All transactions must comply with atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability (ACID) to be logged in the journal, which cannot be deleted or modified. All changes are cryptographically chained and verifiable in a history that customers can analyze using familiar SQL queries.

Amazon QLDB is serverless, so customers don’t have to provision capacity or configure read and write limits. They simply create a ledger, define tables, and Amazon QLDB will automatically scale to support application demands, and customers pay only for the reads, writes, and storage they use

“Earlier this year, when we started talking to customers about what they needed from a blockchain solution, we realized that the Amazon QLDB’s ledger technology met a lot of their requirements. They wanted a centrally-owned ledger that provided an immutable way to log the transactions history of their applications and was transparent to all the parties with whom they were interacting. So, today we’re offering an immutable, transparent, and cryptographically verifiable ledger, based on the same one that AWS teams have been using for years at scale, as a fully managed service.” said Shawn Bice, Vice President, Nonrelational Databases at AWS.

Amazon Managed Blockchain: An easy way to create and manage scalable blockchain networks

Amazon Managed Blockchain is a fully managed blockchain service that makes it easy and cost-effective to create, manage, and scale blockchain networks for multiple parties to transact in a decentralized manner without the need for a centralized, trusted authority.

Amazon Managed Blockchain supports two popular open source blockchain frameworks, Ethereum and Hyperledger Fabric, and setting up a blockchain network is as easy as a few clicks in the AWS Management Console. Customers simply choose their preferred framework, add network members, and configure the member nodes that will process transaction requests. Amazon Managed Blockchain takes care of the rest, creating a blockchain network that can span multiple AWS accounts with multiple nodes per member, and configuring software, security, and network settings.

“Amazon Managed Blockchain eliminates the muck involved in setting up a network, adding and removing members, and scaling to meet application demands. Customers can use either Ethereum or Hyperledger Fabric, the two most popular blockchain frameworks, and get a functioning blockchain network set up with just a few clicks”, said Rahul Pathak, General Manager, Amazon Blockchain at AWS.