Two years after announcing the general availability of its fully-managed blockchain service, Amazon has extended it with Ethereum support.
Using Ethereum on Managed Blockchain, developers can easily instantiate Ethereum nodes without dealing with the complexity of setting up the infrastructure and operating it, says Amazon. This includes ensuring data is encrypted at rest and in transit, node health monitoring and replacing, node scaling when required, and so on.
With the latest announcement, Amazon Managed Blockchain provides the choice of two blockchain frameworks: Hyperledger Fabric and Ethereum. While Hyperledger Fabric is well suited for applications with stringent privacy and access control, Ethereum is better suited for highly distributed networks where transparency of data is critical.
An Ethereum node allows you to develop and use decentralized applications (dapps) that interact with an Ethereum blockchain. The "back-end" of a dapp is a smart contract that runs in a decentralized way across all the nodes joined to an Ethereum network. Anyone joined to the network can develop and deploy a smart contract that adds functionality.
Besides creating your own network, Ethereum on Amazon Managed Blockchain also enables connecting to the public Ethereum mainnet network and to test networks such as Rinkeby and Ropsten.
Ethereum nodes are fully integrated with AWS management console, which enables to create or delete a node and retrieve information about running nodes, including all JSON-RPC endpoints it supports.
Ethereum on Managed Blockchain only supports the eth_sendRawTransaction method, which requires that you create and sign the transaction before sending it to the node. Managed Blockchain does not have any way to sign transactions similar to an Ethereum wallet application.
Only authorized IAM principals in the AWS account that created a node can interact with it using the API. You can find a list of supported API methods here.
Ethereum is a decentralized blockchain framework that establishes a peer-to-peer network to securely execute and verify smart contracts, which allow participants to conduct verified transactions without a trusted central authority. In keeping with blockchain philosophy, transactions are immutable, verifiable, and securely distributed across the network.