Microsoft's Marley Gray introduces Ethereum Blockchain as a Service (EBAAS) on Azure Cloud at DEVCON1 in London, November 2015. This landmark announcement marked the first major cloud provider to offer Ethereum infrastructure, enabling one-click deployment of private Ethereum networks on Azure's global hyperscale cloud platform.

Transcript

[00:21] SPEAKER_00: Good morning. I'm excited to be here this morning, and to guide you through what I see as an exciting development. So I'm here to introduce you, or better yet, let Cortana introduce you to the Galaxy's largest playground for blockchain developers.

So Microsoft Azure is a hyperscale, global cloud platform that has the fundamentals to provide you for infrastructure services like virtual machines and storage and networking, but so much more. Microsoft, when we began the cloud journey we actually overshot the marketplace and developed and focused our attention on platform as a service, essentially building a fabric of APIs that don't have any dependence on particular VMs and instances. Rather you just declaratively program what it is your intentions. So we have a huge portfolio of these platform services that you see here.

Now why am I showing you these platform services instead of focusing on VMs? Platform Services are the future. Worrying about your VMs and what their sizes are and their capabilities are really a thing of the past. We are rather getting to a point where you're declaring in software what your hardware dependencies and needs are. So with this for blockchain developers, I'm just going to point out a couple of these. This is an ichart slide and believe me, this ichart slide has been condensed and simplified. It's a much larger ecosystem. But you can see some of these services like notification hubs, machine learning, which we have rebranded into Cortana analytics, brings machine learning to the masses and makes it achievable in surfacing machine learning capabilities for prediction markets around the world. The event hubs, the key vault. So crypto is very important. We offer a key vault that has a unique service we think will be of interest to this community. And then Active Directory. We talk a little bit about identity and federated identity. How do we first establish identity and how do we allow you to have composite identities? That is a very important thing.

And when I talk about Azure, I'm going to talk about size for a minute. So this is but one building. This building is very large. I don't know if you can see the scale here. Oops. Well, I can't pinch in zoom because it's projecting. But anyway, you can see the cars over there. This is one building in a typical data center in Azure, each data center of the new data centers have four of these buildings connected. At each location we are adding a million cores. That's our run rate every time I say it's a million cores a year, we up that. So we're growing very, very rapidly in this space. Now again this is just one data center, one quarter of a data center.

Now these data centers do span the globe. So when we talk about what's there, we are talking about hyperscale global network. The ones in green that are highlighted, those are coming online later this year. But you can see we basically cover the world, and where we find a need, particularly if it's regulatory, there's a demand from our customers, we'll plop a data center in there. We have data centers in China, we have data centers coming into Canada this year.

Now Azure is an open cloud. It is the most open cloud I would argue. We are not the old Microsoft, this is the new Microsoft. We embrace open source. We actually contribute a great deal to some of the most innovative features that are coming with cloud. And I'm gonna talk about ones that I think are very strategic to what we're trying to do here with Ethereum and our partners. So all of this is available to you in Azure. So you pick and choose the flavor of OS that you want or forget about the OS, pick and choose the database, the platform, the blockchain, the UI, whatever, whatever your dev tools are, support it.

So again this is hyperscale enterprise cloud and before the Red Hat announcement which was last week I believe we announced Red Hat availability for our enterprise customers and really anybody. One in four of our VMs were Linux. We expect that to about double to be about half of our VMs will be Linux based, running in the cloud.

Now I would be remiss in talking about regulatory compliance, for those of you that target enterprise customers, they do tend to care about this stuff. We are the most compliant cloud, and have the largest portfolio of certifications in the world. None of our competitors can attest to this. There's one I put in a question mark about the safe harbor. We'll see what happens there. But I guarantee you if there is a certification to be had, we will get it. If there is a regulatory hurdle to jump, we will jump it. There will not be a blocker for Azure moving forward.

So what is Blockchain as a Service? What are we intending to do? So the first thing we're doing at the enterprise level, so we're targeting primarily our enterprise customers but really this benefits the entire development community, we are creating a set of services that allow our customers to fail fast. Most of our enterprise customers cannot afford to take the jump, particularly into Ethereum or blockchain and use a parachute. When they jump out the plane they need to fall fast and hit the ground fast if they're going to fail, fail early, and then get back up and try it again. Now how do they do that with IT infrastructures and budgets and constraints. It's expensive, they're too slow. We want our customers and our developers to be able to accelerate, experiment rapidly at low cost, to spin up resources on demand, and experiment by mixing and matching different frameworks, different platforms, different tools to create the most awesome Ethereum based applications on the planet.

So we talk about creating private Ethereum environments, how do they do that? Rapidly, supporting the public network, going back and forth, and eventually we're creating that platform to evolve as this technology evolves, to be able to make sure that the services that you need are there.

So the biggest hurdle I always hear from customers is getting started. And I remember July 31st when Frontier came out. I spent the better part of two days sitting in my office trying to get the damn thing up and running. And fortunately I was using Windows, which is even worse. Once I switched to Ubuntu I was a little bit more successful. But we'll try to fix that by the way. But anyway, so we want to make it very easy.

So one click deployment, what does that mean? So in Azure, if you have not seen Azure, I'm going to show it to you in a moment. So the Azure has a portal that our developers and IT pros go to to create and manage resources that are going to be used in the cloud. So we are going to be introducing, this is what I call a soft launch because this is a developer audience. You guys will forgive me if I show you GitHub and things like that. If I did a hard launch it would be all polished and marketing and we wouldn't show you any, I would not definitely show you an SSH shell, or anything like that. But here we're going to show you what the vision is and then I'll actually show you what it looks like at this moment.

But this blockchain category will be up here. Now you'll notice we have some pre-populated items up here and we're talking about the Blockchain as a Service, particularly the Ethereum Blockchain as a Service or EBAAS, provided by ConsenSys. So ConsenSys is launching today, two basic packages, in this marketplace. The marketplace will consist of a private loopback if you will, private blockchain environment based off of the Go implementation. With one click you will install a private network that has a pre-fueled Ether account. So you can go ahead and our intention is to have someone, a newbie and these enterprise customers to with one click be able to deploy and get up and stand up an Ethereum environment, follow a simple script and write their first smart contract application within 20 minutes. If you'd have told me that on the 31st I'd probably come to tears because of the amount of time I spent on learning how not to do it. So we want to make it much easier.

Now we envision our customers picking from this menu and this menu when it says blockchains. We kept it unique because we want services that apply even if you're not providing a full blockchain stack. If you're not doing the C++ implementation or the Go implementation or the Java implementation, but you have a service that you have written that is specifically designed to work with Ethereum networks, you should publish it here to make it discoverable. So we're creating this category and you can see you could go through any one of these and I'm going to walk you through what it looks like. But if you wanted to have a private blockchain, for instance, had six nodes, one node at the east coast of the United States, one in Europe, one in China, one in Japan and one in Singapore, you could do that all within filling up one wizard and click deploy and you'd be up and running within minutes. That's amazingly powerful.

So let me show you what this looks like really quickly. The Marketplace, real fast. If I can come up in, let me not have it extend to my screen. So this is what the Azure Portal looks like. I'm using the Batman theme. It does come in black. So I'm going to come in here and I'm just going to say new and I'm going to create a new, let's say Ubuntu, just because that's what I've been using lately. I'm going to create here and show you what this looks like.

Now I'm not going to go through this process because I'm showing you creating a VM for Ubuntu that's not exciting. I'm gonna let, I'm gonna show you what it's gonna look like to create one of these blockchain assets. But I did want to point out a couple of things. Let me pick a different region and just show you how badass a machine I can create. Let's say I'm really gonna be aggressive with this and I want to say create a, let's see how much money I want to spend. There we go. This looks good. 32 cores and 448 gigs. That looks good to me. So you can see I can pick and choose from a menu of these type of resources and go ahead and just type in a host name. That's not gonna work. That's not gonna work either. Anyway there's a, I can't use spaces of space in there but anyway I can configure this and say go. And it will go out and provision this and create it.

Now for the quick start you're going to see when I told you that for the Ethereum blockchains, we have not stood up the blockchain category yet. That will happen probably by the end of the month. But what you do see, this is the Azure Marketplace. I'm just going to touch on this BlockApps Strato, which they're actually going to show you next. And I'm going to show you the one click deploy of what it looks like for deploying blockchain. So I'm going to create this BlockApps Strato image.

Now this is based on Ubuntu and it has the full stack here. We got a lot of Azure logins. So I'm going to log in really quick and it's going to fire up, come in as me and it's going to fire up right into the template for me to fill in my parameters for my new blockchain environment that I want to spin up. So as we come up and this is live, I'm not chewing a video or anything here. I'm going to name this. Whoops, let me go back. So I'm going to type in some stuff here. I'm going to go on the dev network and put in a password, then say okay and it'll spin up and create it.

Now I'm gonna let these guys actually do that, actually gonna do it live. Let me switch back to my slides really quick and give you the big picture.

So let's talk about the technology. I think that's gonna change the way we deliver these types of services and deliver this value. The first is containers. So namely Docker and Windows containers, they're basically interchangeable at this point. The amount of work we've done with Docker to make container technology ubiquitous across Linux and Windows distributions, and have a single management platform and deployment platform. Working with the Apache foundation we have created an environment where you can mix and match VMs and containers to get the right environment for you at the drop of a hat and be able to change things almost instantly and deploy and scale based on your needs and demand.

And remember this is Azure and if you're not familiar with Azure, Azure is a subscription service. You only pay for what you use. It's not like getting a cable TV package or getting a cell phone package. You're only going to pay for what you use.

So when we have these containers, so a container, if you're not familiar with Docker, it runs within a VM or it can run on the hypervisor itself. We are creating an image repository and these image repositories are going to have containers that have prepackaged like say a stack for Ethereum, a particular stack and you could have 10, 20, 30 different types of stacks that you can mix and match, select those from the image repository and then spin up on your platform the stack that you're wanting to build upon.

Now where this leads us is to this broader vision for blockchains. So the Ethereum Blockchain as a Service vision with containers and the ability to dynamically spin up these type of resources. We envision an era of microservices. So microservices, we are really decomposing, may go back to the talks yesterday, the capability so that you can quickly compose solutions and be able to look at these different capabilities in this service fabric and be able to begin developing blockchain based applications, consuming and exposing these other additional value added services such that the blockchain development and the ecosystem becomes a much richer environment for our enterprise customers.

So my question for you is as you look at this type of environment, and noting that in the back if you grab one of those big posters it has a $200 certificate. It's like winning the lottery. You get that big check that actually you can't do anything with. Actually you don't have to take the poster but everyone that's in attendance will have the ability to get a $200 credit for Azure, to be able to evaluate this and start building your apps and looking at building Ethereum APIs, blockchain APIs, crypto services, whatever you can dream of, to build on this platform. My question to you is, what will you add? Thank you.