Microsoft has announced the launch of the Azure Blockchain Development Kit, developed on its serverless technologies.
According to the company, the new Azure-based platform seamlessly integrates distributed ledger technology (DLT) with Microsoft’s and third-party software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions.
"This kit extends the capabilities of our blockchain developer templates and Azure Blockchain Workbench, which incorporates Azure services for key management, off-chain identity and data, monitoring, and messaging APIs into a reference architecture that can be used to rapidly build blockchain-based applications." wrote Marc Mercuri, principal program managers for Microsoft's Blockchain Engineering team.
Specifically, the initial release of the DLT-powered Azure software development kit (SDK) is aimed at helping to connect different interfaces, deploy smart contracts and blockchain networks, and integrating data and systems.
For connecting, the kit aims to help organizations, people and devices to connect to the blockchain. The kit includes samples for SMS and voice interfaces, IoT device, mobile clients, backend systems and data, bots and assistants and web clients.
For integrating data and systems, initial blockchain SDK focuses on documents and media, and smart contract interaction. The kit includes a set of logic apps for hashing files and file related metadata and smart contracts for files and a file registry.
“End to end blockchain solutions require integration with data, software, and media that live ‘off chain.’ External updates and events can trigger actions on smart contracts. Smart contract events and state changes can then trigger actions and data updates to ‘off chain’ systems and data. These external systems and AI will also need the ability to query attestable data from smart contracts to inform action.” noted Mercuri.
Source: Azure.microsoft
The blockchain app development kit also includes integration samples for legacy apps and protocols, data, SaaS and registers. The company also made known the release of Logic Apps and Flow Connectors to extend samples to Ethereum, Corda, and Bitcoin.
The company has also introduced DevOps for Blockchain Smart Contracts, a whitepaper that details using the development kit for blockchain-based apps in a multitude of scenarios.
