Last December Microsoft’s Azure team partnered with ConsenSys to offer Ethereum Blockchain to customers. The partnership saw Ethereum Blockchain become an EBaaS on top of Microsoft’s Azure service for enterprise clients and developers, giving both a one-click cloud-based workflow environment for developing.
Hot off the heels of that development, the Azure team is now announcing its Project Bletchley that seeks to address concerns and suggestions its receiving from early adopters of its new blockchain offering.
We’ve learned a lot about essential platform principles, features, and capabilities that will enable enterprises to adopt blockchain. To address this, we’re introducing Project Bletchley, which outlines Microsoft’s vision for an open, modular blockchain fabric powered by Azure, and highlights new elements we believe are key in enterprise blockchain architecture.
- Project Bletchley addresses common themes we’re hearing from early adopters of blockchain across industries, including:
- Platform openness is a requirement.
- Features like identity, key management, privacy, security, operations management and interoperability need to be integrated.
- Performance, scale, support and stability are crucial.
- Consortium blockchains, which are members-only, permissioned networks for consortium members to execute contracts, are ideal.
More to the point, Project Bletchley target issues about middleware and cryptlets. The technologies of blockchain middleware will “provide core services functioning in the cloud, like identity and operations management, in addition to data and intelligence services like analytics and machine learning.” Whereas cyptlets will come the connective communication tissue between Azure, ecosystem middleware and client side technologies.
In case you’re wondering about the “cryptic” name, Bletchley Park was of course the secret headquarters for the British MI6 team that cracked the Nazi Enigma code during World War II.
The Azure team is hoping that Project Bletchley will help increase Azure’s flexibility across platforms and for customer demand. As of right now, Project Bletchley is perhaps, only a test bed for Azure future vision, with no release or beta roll out listed.
However, those interested can check out the details of Project Bletchley at Microsoft’s whitepaper section, here.
