Amazon Managed Blockchain at Last Supports Ethereum, Ending a Two-Year Tease

Amazon Web Services (AWS) “managed blockchain” service now supports Ethereum out of the box, some two years after the integration was first hinted at in 2018.

“With this launch, AWS customers can easily provision Ethereum nodes in minutes and connect to the public Ethereum main network and test networks such as Rinkeby and Ropsten,” AWS said in a blog post Tuesday.

Amazon Managed Blockchain also supports Hyperledger Fabric, a permissioned blockchain network intended for enterprise applications.

AWS previewed Ethereum support in December.

Read more: Amazon Plays Its Own Game With Enterprise Blockchain

“With Amazon Managed Blockchain, customers get secure networking, encryption at rest and transport, secure access to the network via standard open-source Ethereum APIs, fast and reliable syncs to the Ethereum blockchain, and durable elastic storage for ledger data,” the blog posts add.

There are over 8,300 Ethereum nodes currently on the Ethereum network, according to Etherscan. Nodes keep consensus on the ledger, check transactions, and protect the network against hostile actors. A higher number of geographically and systematically separate nodes is generally considered healthy for the network. 

"It's an incredible signal for the value of Ethereum in modern applications to have a big player like AWS get serious about tooling," Infura head of product Mike Godsey said a message to CoinDesk after publication. "This will inevitably expand the developer base using this technology and that is great for the whole ecosystem."

Correction (March 3, 5:00 UTC): Hyperleger Fabric is not a fork of the Ethereum software, as a previous version of this article stated. A quote from Infura was also included after publication of this article.