Cloud computing and blockchain accelerate the integration of cloud service market to welcome new changes
In the past two years, blockchain technology has been regarded as another disruptive innovation after mainframe, PC and Internet. It is a reliable technical solution to collectively maintain "one book" through centralization and trust. At present, blockchain has been applied from digital currency to various fields of economy and society, and "blockchain+" will have a significant impact on the industry, even disruptive changes.
However, the cost of development, research and testing of blockchain technology involves some systems, and time and capital costs become the key factors limiting the development of blockchain technology. However, if the cloud computing platform is used to build the test environment, the above problems will be solved. At the same time, the integrated development of cloud computing and blockchain technologies has further created a new cloud service market "Block as a service", which not only speeds up the application and development of blockchain technology in many fields, but also brings changes and development in the cloud service market.
Cloud based blockchain platform reduces deployment costs
With the blockchain technology entering the 3.0 era, the elimination of blockchain technology itself has not said anything, and the infrastructure construction behind it has become the focus of major business competition. Blockchain is one of the underlying technologies of Bitcoin, which solves the problem of trust control in multidimensional transactions. In fact, blockchain is a collection of various technologies. It is essentially a P2P based value transmission protocol. Its core is consensus mechanism, distributed network, asymmetric encryption system and smart contract. At present, the block chain is divided into three categories: public chain, alliance chain, private chain, and concentration degree. The category of participating groups: node access, trust approval, and other scenarios.
Similar to blockchain technology, cloud computing is essentially the product of distributed computing, parallel computing, network storage, virtualization, load balancing and other traditional computer and network technology development. It is flexible, fast adjustment, low cost, high reliability and other characteristics. At present, cloud computing is also divided into public cloud, private cloud and hybrid cloud.
From the perspective of network architecture, it is easy to see that the three types of blockchain are very similar to the three types of cloud computing. Public chain and public cloud emphasize openness and share resources or information; Private chains and private clouds emphasize that individuals use customers or groups as proprietary resources; Alliance and hybrid cloud emphasize the privacy of data or information while sharing other resources. However, the block chain of cloud computing is not just such a conceptual similarity. The architecture and some applications are similar to the form and implementation of cloud computing. Block network is a distributed network based on IP communication protocol and two technologies. There is no central server node and central management node.
From the perspective of data structure and computing power, block chain is also called distributed book technology. Based on distributed network, each data file is shredded without the approval of other central institutions, and the user's own secret key is encrypted and distributed in the network. At the same time, the concept of "proof of work" introduced by the chain technology ensures that the recorder has made some efforts in writing data through comparative calculation. Cloud computing uses virtualization technology to realize the virtualization of storage, computing and network, and the matching requirements of distributed storage block chain and computing.
From the perspective of smart contracts in the chain, smart contracts are generally considered as an automatic guarantee account, for example, when certain conditions are met, programs release and transfer funds; From a technical point of view, smart contracts are considered as network servers, but these servers do not use the IP addresses set up on the Internet, but are built on the surface of the block chain on which specific contract programs can be run. The traditional contract is implemented under the legal framework. The smart contract is the "assembly language" on the chain, and the computer can automatically implement the agreement. The essence of cloud computing is that the original different organizations, geographically dispersed hardware and software resources are highly integrated on a centralized platform. Through network and virtualization technology, costs are reduced and allocated on demand according to the business needs of organizations and users.
According to the above analysis from the perspective of network architecture, data structure and computing capability requirements, and smart contract, blockchain and cloud computing technologies, on the one hand, use the existing infrastructure services of cloud computing or change according to actual needs to accelerate the development and application process to meet the future blockchain ecosystem, start-ups, academic institutions, open source institutions, The demand of alliances and financial institutions for blockchain applications. On the other hand, for cloud computing, "reliable, reliable and controllable" is considered that the development of cloud computing must overturn the "three mountains", and link technology is the center, anonymity and data can not be tampered with as the main characteristics, while the long-term development goal of cloud computing is consistent.
Cloud computing currently provides three types of services, namely IaaS, PaaS and Sa. In the case of IaaS layer, cloud computing can provide basic distributed storage services for block chains. In the future, it is possible to calculate the block chain based on the separate calculation module. For PaaS layer, cloud computing can be a block chain application that provides middleware services, such as development tools and runtime environment; For the SaaS layer, you can integrate modular SDKs or plug-in tools to directly provide services for blockchain applications.
The cloud service provider has started the BaaS service
Cloud computing vendors, seeing that the chain provides potential business opportunities for customers, have to prevent chain companies from "going out of the olive branch". The industry has started to use block chain technology to build the cloud computing service platform BaaS. The difficulty of effective solutions for traditional industry IT construction lies in the flexible structure and rapid deployment. The online business of the past six months can now be launched in half a month, Real time and cost savings. At the same time, it also solved the waste caused by equipment expansion. "After the project is completed, resources will be released immediately". In terms of security, the configuration must prevent internal attacks, business system isolation at the advanced authentication level, security service containers, tampering with corresponding hardware security modules, highly auditable operating environment and other security protection measures.
Microsoft announced in November 2015 that it would provide BaaS services on the Azure cloud platform and officially opened it to the public in August 2016. Developers can create blockchain environments on the platform in the simplest and most efficient way.
In February 2016, IBM announced the launch of a blockchain service platform that utilizes the new blockchain service launched by IBM on Bluemix, allowing developers to access fully integrated development operation tools for creating and deploying, running and monitoring blockchain applications on the IBM cloud.
Amazon announced its cooperation with Digital Currency Group in May 2016. Digital Currency Group is one of the largest investors in the chain chain field. DCG investment companies provide blockchain services to ensure that they can handle customers in a secure environment, including financial institutions, insurance companies and enterprise technology companies.
The Significance and Thinking of the Blocking Chain of BaaS Development
The combination of blockchain and cloud computing makes BaaS a public trust infrastructure, forming the development trend of embedding blockchain technology framework into cloud computing platform. Among them, the chain enterprise platform represented by the alliance chain needs to use cloud facilities to improve the block chain ecological environment. The block chain represented by the public chain needs to provide a stable and reliable cloud computing platform for central applications. The combination of the two technologies is to meet the needs of enterprises and developers in various industries and fields. It can quickly build, deploy, test and dismantle the environment, reducing deployment time and labor costs. At the same time, in order to provide various levels of service capabilities, the emergence of the BaaS cloud service market has brought new profit points.
However, innovative technologies, including blockchain technology, are not only a process of replication, but also the development of blockchain with blockchain. While BaaS directly provides users with public connection example services like Bitcoin/Ethernet, not only to provide the construction of blockchain system services, but also to focus on products and application innovation.
