Simplifying Blockchain Development with Azure Blockchain Workbench

This week, developers from around the world join us at our annual Microsoft Build conference to hear about the latest in technology innovation. Blockchain remains a key topic of interest.

Over the past 18 months, thousands of customers have experimented with the blockchain templates and developer tooling available on our Azure Marketplace to begin their blockchain journeys. Businesses across industries have built a variety of applications to address needs ranging from pharmaceutical counterfeiting and travel booking reconciliation, to the creation of digital domestic currencies. While the use cases are diverse, the challenges for customers just beginning their journey have been the same – bespoke applications are costly and time consuming to develop and notoriously difficult to integrate.

Azure Blockchain Workbench simplifies blockchain application development by providing a solution using several Azure components. Blockchain Workbench can be deployed using a solution template in the Azure Marketplace. The template allows users to pick the modules and components to deploy with Blockchain Workbench, such as blockchain stack, type of client application, and support for IoT integration. Once deployed, Blockchain Workbench provides access to a web app, iOS app, and Android app.

Identity and authentication

Using Blockchain Workbench, a consortium can federate their enterprise identities using Azure Active Directory (Azure AD). Workbench generates new user accounts for on-chain identities with the enterprise identities stored in Azure AD. The identity mapping facilitates authenticated login to client APIs and applications and uses the authentication policies of organizations. Workbench also provides the ability to associate enterprise identities to specific roles within a given smart contract. In addition, Workbench also provides a mechanism to identify the actions those roles can take and at what time.

Azure Blockchain Workbench is a collection of Azure services and capabilities designed to help you create and deploy blockchain applications to share business processes and data with other organizations. Azure Blockchain Workbench provides the infrastructure scaffolding for building blockchain applications enabling developers to focus on creating business logic and smart contracts. It also makes it easier to create blockchain applications by integrating several Azure services and capabilities to help automate common development tasks.

Client applications

Workbench provides automatically generated client applications for web and mobile (iOS, Android), which can be used to validate, test, and view blockchain applications. The application interface is dynamically generated based on smart contract metadata and can accommodate any use case. The client applications deliver a user-facing front end to the complete blockchain applications generated by Blockchain Workbench. Client applications authenticate users via Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) and then present a user experience tailored to the business context of the smart contract. The user experience enables the creation of new smart contract instances by authorized individuals and then presents the ability to execute certain types of transactions at appropriate points in the business process the smart contract represents.

Integrate blockchain with applications

You can use the Blockchain Workbench REST APIs and message-based APIs to integrate with existing systems. The APIs provide an interface to allow for replacing or using multiple distributed ledger technologies, storage, and database offerings.

Blockchain Workbench can transform messages sent to its message-based API to build transactions in a format expected by that blockchain’s native API. Workbench can sign and route transactions to the appropriate blockchain.

Workbench automatically delivers events to Service Bus and Event Grid to send messages to downstream consumers. Developers can integrate with either of these messaging systems to drive transactions and to look at results.

Deploy a blockchain network

Azure Blockchain Workbench simplifies consortium blockchain network setup as a preconfigured solution with an Azure Resource Manager solution template. The template provides simplified deployment that deploys all components needed to run a consortium. Today, Blockchain Workbench currently supports Ethereum.

Use Active Directory login

With existing blockchain protocols, blockchain identities are represented as an address on the network. Azure Blockchain Workbench abstracts away the blockchain identity by associating it with an Active Directory identity, making it simpler to build enterprise applications with Active Directory identities.

In summary, Azure Blockchain Workbench dramatically reduces development costs and accelerates time to value for developers, independent software vendors and integration partners alike. Workbench’s dynamically generated UI automatically adjusts to changes in workflow definitions, and Workbench includes sample workflows and an admin experience for workflow and user provisioning. These features mean that users can rapidly create and iterate on multiparty workflows with minimal coding.

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