Nearly a year ago, Microsoft announced its Azure Blockchain as a Service offering for its cloud computing service. Now, it is giving customers access to Project Bletchley, which provides enterprises some of the tools they need to create blockchain-based applications.
Blockchain is the technology that underlies Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, and it can be used to create distributed ledgers for many different kinds of transactions. It’s of particular interest to the banking and finance industries.
The Bletchley V1 release is a template for setting up blockchain networks quickly. “At a high level, the template provisions and configures a subnet of mining nodes for each consortium member and a set of load-balanced transaction nodes that members can share to communicate with the network. Through the administrator web page, you can configure additional Ethereum accounts to get started with smart contract and eventually application development,” a Microsoft blog explained.
