ConsenSys Quorum Blockchain Service Now Publicly Available

ConsenSys is pleased to announce that Quorum Blockchain Service is available today in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace. Since 2016, the world’s largest companies across banking, supply chain and retail have trusted Quorum as the foundation for groundbreaking Ethereum-based applications. Built on years of experience managing some of the ecosystems largest consortia, Quorum Blockchain Service (QBS) is a fully-managed platform-as-a-service offering designed to simplify the creation, configuration and management of the Quorum networks. 

Ethereum in the Enterprise

In our increasingly global and digital world, business processes touch multiple organizations and great sums are spent managing workflows that cross trust boundaries. No company delivers value in a vacuum and success is tied to dozens of processes shared with suppliers, partners, and regulators. The importance of trust has never been higher and enterprises have come to see blockchain as a transformational technology that enables multi-party business processes with trust and transparency. 

Ethereum remains a popular choice for businesses shaping new blockchain-based  applications because of its deep developer network and extensive toolchain, but for many enterprise use cases the public, permissionless nature of mainnet poses regulatory challenges. While the ecosystem has no shortage of infrastructure options to balance transaction costs, throughput, and transactional privacy, ConsenSys Quorum has remained a gold standard for enterprises sharing sensitive data and business logic on private, permissioned blockchain networks. 

Building a private, permissioned network where multiple parties deploy and manage infrastructure can be a daunting task, however. Enterprises require significant knowledge and developer operations (devops) to ensure all parties have a robust and reliable infrastructure. In addition, they need to patch the nodes in a timely manner and connect them securely.  

Quorum Blockchain Service, available today in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace, addresses node and infrastructure challenges, simplifying the formation, management, and governance of Quorum-based blockchain networks so businesses can focus on workflow logic and application development and not the infrastructure it sits on. 

“Prescryptive Health is thrilled with the public launch of ConsenSys’ Quorum Blockchain Service. QBS delivers the ability to grow and operate Prescryptive’s blockchain network at scale and ensures compatibility across the Ethereum ecosystem with industry-defining standards for developer and operations tooling. QBS and ConsenSys are essential partners to Prescryptive’s work bringing transparency to the prescription drug market. With QBS, Prescryptive has launched a patented blockchain-based health platform that gives consumers the power to ‘own’ their prescriptions for the first time, putting the consumer at the center of their health by enabling transparency and control of health plan data, prescription drug pricing, affordability options, and better interactions with prescribers and pharmacists.” – Tony Little, Vice-President, Solution Architecture, Prescryptive

Deploy a Blockchain Network in Minutes

Leveraging the Microsoft Managed Application framework, deploying a QBS network is a simple, single-screen create experience. Available in seven Azure regions that cover all major geographies across the globe, QBS provides three tiers of service that include support tailored for your needs. Whether you’re a developer just getting started, or ready to deploy a production application, QBS has you covered.

When provisioned, QBS deploys several Azure services that together comprise your blockchain network. These services include:

• Virtual machines that act as transaction and validator nodes
• Storage accounts that contain your chain and configuration data
• Virtual network that facilitates secure communication between nodes in the network
• Azure Key Vault that  stores the keys of your transaction nodes

Take the “Ops” out of DevOps

Once deployed, your QBS network is monitored and managed around the clock by ConsenSys engineers to ensure your network is healthy and performant. We ensure patching so that  your nodes have the latest security and GoQuorum protocol updates, and monitor your network’s performance. In addition, we provide protections for disaster recovery in case the datacenter hosting your network has an outage.

QBS provides the ability for you to customize your network through QBS Management APIs. The APIs let you configure and manage your network, such as setting firewall rules, managing API keys and adding additional nodes. In addition, QBS provides comprehensive monitoring and logging capabilities that enable you to see your network’s activity and performance. You can also easily configure alerts to be sent to a webhook or even a text message to your phone, so you can be notified of issues if they occur. 

Enable Multi-party Business Processes

A single QBS member is useful, but the power that Quorum unlocks is the ability to securely transact with other parties on a single shared ledger. Members can build private blockchain networks called consortiums, which are limited to specific network participants. 

However, building these consortiums requires manually configuring nodes to securely connect with one another. It is one of the most time-consuming and error-prone processes when building a blockchain network.

With QBS, configuring a consortium consists of a single API that enables you to invite another company to provision a QBS member that will automatically be securely connected to your member on the same ledger. The party invited receives an email, with a personal invitation code which is used when they provision their QBS member. Once provisioning is complete, you  have a network!

Each member in a consortium has one or more transaction nodes, which are running the Tessera private transaction manager, enabling parties to send private transactions to one another. These transactions are visible only to the parties they were intended for. This is important for scenarios such as supply chain management where multiple suppliers interact with each other but require certain transactions to be visible only to particular parties, such as a distributor.

Start Your Blockchain Journey

Whether you’re building a consortium application in financial services or healthcare, a new economy company, or a decentralized product offering, ConsenSys has the best platform for web3 applications. 

With our developer tools, scalable infrastructure, audit services and deployment experience, developers can control and accelerate the launch and operation of their applications on the infrastructure that best suits their needs

Ready to try Quorum Blockchain Service? Start here to learn about pricing and deploy your first QBS member. Don’t forget to join our Discord community, where you can ask questions to the Product Team and interact with other QBS users.