Microsoft has furthered its blockchain offering through multi-member consortium support on Azure. The feature fills enterprises’ need easy deployment on private networks across separate Azure regions and subscriptions.
According to senior program manager of Azure Christine Avanessians, Microsoft is seeing three common topologies emerge:
- “Single organization, multiple subscriptions: This is a common topology when divisions in an organization do not trust each other, for example when one division is auditing another division. Each division has its own footprint, but they are physically separated in different subscriptions across the same Azure AD tenant.
2. Multiple organizations, private: This is the true consortium scenario where each organization will have its own footprint and subscriptions, Azure AD tenants, and regions are all different. Given enterprise IT requirements, the services deployed must not be publicly accessible on the internet, even though communication will occur across organizations.
3. Multiple organizations, public-facing: Similar to the above topology, but in industries, enterprises, or scenarios where IT requirements allow or require the services deployed to be accessible to the public, over the internet. This simplifies the network connectivity requirements for the distributed system.”
Solution Templates
Today Microsoft is focusing on the first two topologies via a set of solution templates in the Azure marketplace. They consist of multi-step command-line processes, one to deploy and configure the initial consortium region, and one to deploy and configure additional members.
The templates apparently make the whole process much easier, and can be completed by someone with little knowledge of Azure of Ethereum.
“Rather than spending hours building out and configuring the infrastructure and networking across organizations,” wrote Avanessians, “we have automated these time-consuming pieces to allow you to focus on building out the consortium and your production pilots.”
You can view the templates today on the Azure Marketplace, and find out more on the blog.
Last Updated on April 13, 2017 11:14 am CEST