15 ms·

Microsoft Retires Azure Blockchain

73 points by galaxyLogic 5y ago

prepend 5y ago
IBM retired theirs and now Microsoft. It blows my mind that anyone in their right mind would ever make a blockchain using these companies’ proprietary implementations. Not that I understand the other blockchain projects, but it seems even crazier to use a proprietary company’s solution.
- andyana 5y ago
  > Blockchain offers the capacity to create a “digital birth certificate” for every part and update it each time the part moves through the supply chain or is installed on a plane. The part’s status also gets updated every time the plane is serviced or inspected by a technician. They think it's better to use a blockchain for this instead of a spreadsheet.
  - waych 5y ago
    Blockchain allows multiple parties to amend data using distributed and untrusting infrastructure, in a tamper proof way. The problems addressed are a bit more involved than a spreadsheet.
    - qeternity 5y ago
      This is classic blockchain handwaving. If you’re an airplane manufacturer sourcing parts, you’re going to be placing a hell of a lot of trust in your partners. Jumping through all the hoops of blockchain gets you very little, if anything, net of cost.
      - reportt 5y ago
        The only time in which you would need blockchain over a centralized DB is when everyone needs access to the DB, but no one trusts each other. Like if you needed to store healthcare information for multiple people which theoretically could be accessed by multiple competing hospitals or something. It's a lot of overhead to legitimize not just using a centralized DB for most applications.
        nexuist 5y ago
        For most applications, yes. But the "multiple people which theoretically could be accessed by multiple competing hospitals" is actually a real use case too. In many fields competitors could benefit from having access to the same curated, real time dataset. For example, a list of pharmacies or local insurance policy plans if you're a hospital. The problem is that none of the players in the game are incentivized to build this service because it requires someone to host the server on their infrastructure - and if you don't host it yourself, what happens if/when your partner decides to shut it down, or cut you out, or serve you false information? With a small blockchain each competitor can host their own version of the data and share new rows in an auditable, traceable, and permanent way (such that another user cannot go in and delete anything). It's easy to get lost in the hype, but peer to peer applications always serve valid use cases. A peer to peer database is no different even if it's enamored by cryptobros and scammers.
        XorNot 5y ago
        How would this solve anything? Competing for what? If a bunch of people are competing on say, price, then what's stopping them putting any number they want into the system, or similarly just rejecting every number anyone else puts into the system? They have no aligned interests in the blockchain, and outside of it the legal system already defines their responsibility (i.e. prices must be advertised accurately). "Blockchain" aka a Git repository is only useful when multiple trusted parties are trying to coordinate a central source of truth without inadvertently removing each others changes. At which point we can dispense with anything that sounds like cryptocurrency because it's all just signed commits.
        madeofpalk 5y ago
      - nexuist 5y ago
        Having a database that can run through multiple nodes should be very enticing given the recent ransomware attacks that ground centralized databases to a halt. Instead of waiting days to restore their billing system, Colonial could have just brought in more nodes under a blockchain system and sacrificed the ransomware'd ones. As long as one survived with the data intact, all other nodes would have been able to get the data from it while verifying lack of tampering (something your backups can't tell you without lots of hard work). Don't we argue against centralization on HN all of the time? There's so many good arguments against putting everything you rely on onto one server that can get bopped by random Ukrainian teenagers.
        XorNot 5y ago
        Where would the data have survived? Colonial would have to be paying someone to hold their extra nodes, in which case....they could've just paid to hold backups anyway.
        dvfjsdhgfv 5y ago
        > Colonial could have just brought in more nodes under a blockchain system How is that different from having backup copies with a third party? Organizations really need to learn how to make ransmoware-proof backups. Blockchain has many uses but by itself won't protect anyone against ransomware attacks.
        qeternity 5y ago
        It's not different. Like I said, it's just classic blockchain handwaving.
        qeternity 5y ago
        > Don't we argue against centralization on HN all of the time? No, we argue the right paradigm for the right use case. Both centralization and decentralization have their pros and cons. But the blockchain decentralize-all-the-things group think is just people who don't quite grasp the tech being blinded by the hype. What you've described (adding more nodes) is just classic DR: spin up your infra from append-only backups in a warm site, or better yet, failover to a hot site with minimal downtime.
      - waych 5y ago
        How much value do you give to being tamper proof, to having multi party untrusting infrastructure, to being decentralized? How much do those add up to in your net cost calculation? How do achieve for these with your alternative solutions? What does that cost? The airplane manufacturer doesn't want to expose their database to their partners. They also don't want to write bespoke applications and services with their partners and doesn't really expect them to adapt to those interfaces that in turn front the database. None of this helps reconcile wtf happened across systems when sides disagree. Having a common distributed way to share a ledger is a valid problem to have and a blockchain is a valid way to solve that problem. Contracts further sweeten the pot.
  - beckingz 5y ago
    For use cases like this, the automation needed to get the data into and out of a blockchain may make it a better solution than spreadsheets.
    - andyana 5y ago
      No.
- galgalesh 5y ago
  IBM's implementation is open source. They had a SaaS offering for this open source project on their cloud, which is what they're shutting down.
- globular-toast 5y ago
  I guess you haven't work at a large corporation that thinks it's a tech company then. I worked at a large insurance company and, while I was there, machine learning and AI were the strongest buzzwords going. Blockchain was just starting to emerge. If you were doing any project at all you could get automatic thumbs up from senior level execs if you name-dropped machine learning or AI. They'd enthusiastically nod their heads upon hearing it. I think this was supposed to convey "great application of this technology I understand!" but once you saw through that it really meant "I've heard of that!"
- nickysielicki 5y ago
  A bunch of talking heads went on CNBC over the past 5-10 years and talked about how existing cryptocurrencies like bitcoin were outlaw non-starters, but that "blockchain technology" was novel and here to stay, provided that governments and big banks would be able to retain control. Those people were and still are idiots, but there were enough of them to catch the attention of unimaginative MBAs at big unimaginative places like Microsoft and IBM -- to spawn products like these.
Delphiza 5y ago
Microsoft announced that they are retiring their blockchain project about two weeks before they announced Azure SQL Database ledger. So a centralised solution where parties are trusted - I think. https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/azure-sql/announcing-azure-sql-database-ledger/ba-p/2200401 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/azure-sql/announcing-...
- muyuu 5y ago
  seems like the engineers were allowed into the decision room
  - DrAwdeOccarim 5y ago
    It's funny how true this may actually be. I had a 5 minute discussion with KOLs at my company back when etherium launched trying to square peg-round hole something in the business to run on it. We didn't have any luck. Ultimately, we wanted to own the database/data and if someone wanted to purchase from us/use our services they would have to trust us.
    - jules-jules 5y ago
      Why is it so difficult to spell Ethereum correctly?
      - 3PS 5y ago
        cat dict.txt | rg "ium$" | uniq | sed -z "s/\n/, /g" Who knows? Perhaps they thought it would be spelled more similarly to aluminium, ammonium, auditorium, calcium, compendium, cranium, delirium, emporium, encomium, equilibrium, eulogium, exordium, geranium, gymnasium, medium, millennium, odium, omnium, opium, opprobrium, pandemonium, potassium, premium, radium, sodium, tedium, uranium...
      - Craighead 5y ago
        Because it doesn't matter
funman7 5y ago
People are realizing what blockchain technology actually is now. When those ibm commercials came out promoting blockchain it felt awkward to watch like why are they talking like this
- qeternity 5y ago
  IBM getting involved in something is a pretty good indicator of where we are in the hype cycle, unfortunately.
kypro 5y ago
Is anybody aware of any interesting projects built on Microsoft's or IMB's blockchain tech?
- dmitriid 5y ago
  This question assumes there are any interesting projects on the blockchain.
- 2cb 5y ago
  They're geared for enterprise so they're not exactly something you'd look to for "interesting projects." If you look at the smart contract platforms built on top of various cryptocurrencies, however, you will find plenty of active projects. Whether or not they're interesting to you, I can't promise anything. But there's plenty of use cases being explored from simple games to tokenised art to decentralised DNS replacements.
vmception 5y ago
in before someone says yield farming would make more sense in an MySQL database
- 2cb 5y ago
  "Just stick it on a spreadsheet bro."
messutied 5y ago
Does anybody know some good real life examples of projects using blockchain? (other than cryptocurrencies of course) Whenever I tried to find some all I can find is proof of concepts, or new projects to evaluate the technology, but they never seem to consolidate. I feel like there should be more tangible and clearly successful examples by now, if the technology was really promising.
- dmitriid 5y ago
  > I feel like there should be more tangible and clearly successful examples by now, if the technology was really promising. Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain: https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/ten-years-in-nobody-has-come-up-with-a-use-case-for-blockchain-ee98c180100 https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/ten-years-in-nobody-has-c... And the followup, Blockchain is not only crappy technology but a bad vision for the future https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/decentralized-and-trustless-crypto-paradise-is-actually-a-medieval-hellhole-c1ca122efdec https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/decentralized-and-trustle...
- accurrent 5y ago
  Where I live, the tertiary institutions place your degree on a blockchain. TBH I have know idea why a simple digital signature would not suffice but I guess blockchain sounds cooler.
- naraga 5y ago
  Microsoft ION - Decentralized identity anchored in Bitcoin ledger. https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/identity-standards-blog/ion-we-have-liftoff/ba-p/1441555 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/identity-standards-bl...
  - muyuu 5y ago
    yea but it's built on top of bitcoin, so basically not its own blockchain
    - naraga 5y ago
Uhrheber 5y ago
Obligatory xkcd link: https://xkcd.com/2030/ https://xkcd.com/2030/
mangecoeur 5y ago
I guess we've fallen off the end of the blockchain hype curve

73 points by galaxyLogic 5y ago

IBM retired theirs and now Microsoft. It blows my mind that anyone in their right mind would ever make a blockchain using these companies’ proprietary implementations. Not that I understand the other blockchain projects, but it seems even crazier to use a proprietary company’s solution.

andyana 5y ago
> Blockchain offers the capacity to create a “digital birth certificate” for every part and update it each time the part moves through the supply chain or is installed on a plane. The part’s status also gets updated every time the plane is serviced or inspected by a technician. They think it's better to use a blockchain for this instead of a spreadsheet.
- waych 5y ago
  Blockchain allows multiple parties to amend data using distributed and untrusting infrastructure, in a tamper proof way. The problems addressed are a bit more involved than a spreadsheet.
  - qeternity 5y ago
    This is classic blockchain handwaving. If you’re an airplane manufacturer sourcing parts, you’re going to be placing a hell of a lot of trust in your partners. Jumping through all the hoops of blockchain gets you very little, if anything, net of cost.
    - reportt 5y ago
      The only time in which you would need blockchain over a centralized DB is when everyone needs access to the DB, but no one trusts each other. Like if you needed to store healthcare information for multiple people which theoretically could be accessed by multiple competing hospitals or something. It's a lot of overhead to legitimize not just using a centralized DB for most applications.
      - nexuist 5y ago
        For most applications, yes. But the "multiple people which theoretically could be accessed by multiple competing hospitals" is actually a real use case too. In many fields competitors could benefit from having access to the same curated, real time dataset. For example, a list of pharmacies or local insurance policy plans if you're a hospital. The problem is that none of the players in the game are incentivized to build this service because it requires someone to host the server on their infrastructure - and if you don't host it yourself, what happens if/when your partner decides to shut it down, or cut you out, or serve you false information? With a small blockchain each competitor can host their own version of the data and share new rows in an auditable, traceable, and permanent way (such that another user cannot go in and delete anything). It's easy to get lost in the hype, but peer to peer applications always serve valid use cases. A peer to peer database is no different even if it's enamored by cryptobros and scammers.
        XorNot 5y ago
        How would this solve anything? Competing for what? If a bunch of people are competing on say, price, then what's stopping them putting any number they want into the system, or similarly just rejecting every number anyone else puts into the system? They have no aligned interests in the blockchain, and outside of it the legal system already defines their responsibility (i.e. prices must be advertised accurately). "Blockchain" aka a Git repository is only useful when multiple trusted parties are trying to coordinate a central source of truth without inadvertently removing each others changes. At which point we can dispense with anything that sounds like cryptocurrency because it's all just signed commits.
      - madeofpalk 5y ago
    - nexuist 5y ago
      Having a database that can run through multiple nodes should be very enticing given the recent ransomware attacks that ground centralized databases to a halt. Instead of waiting days to restore their billing system, Colonial could have just brought in more nodes under a blockchain system and sacrificed the ransomware'd ones. As long as one survived with the data intact, all other nodes would have been able to get the data from it while verifying lack of tampering (something your backups can't tell you without lots of hard work). Don't we argue against centralization on HN all of the time? There's so many good arguments against putting everything you rely on onto one server that can get bopped by random Ukrainian teenagers.
      - XorNot 5y ago
        Where would the data have survived? Colonial would have to be paying someone to hold their extra nodes, in which case....they could've just paid to hold backups anyway.
      - dvfjsdhgfv 5y ago
        > Colonial could have just brought in more nodes under a blockchain system How is that different from having backup copies with a third party? Organizations really need to learn how to make ransmoware-proof backups. Blockchain has many uses but by itself won't protect anyone against ransomware attacks.
        qeternity 5y ago
        It's not different. Like I said, it's just classic blockchain handwaving.
      - qeternity 5y ago
        > Don't we argue against centralization on HN all of the time? No, we argue the right paradigm for the right use case. Both centralization and decentralization have their pros and cons. But the blockchain decentralize-all-the-things group think is just people who don't quite grasp the tech being blinded by the hype. What you've described (adding more nodes) is just classic DR: spin up your infra from append-only backups in a warm site, or better yet, failover to a hot site with minimal downtime.
    - waych 5y ago
      How much value do you give to being tamper proof, to having multi party untrusting infrastructure, to being decentralized? How much do those add up to in your net cost calculation? How do achieve for these with your alternative solutions? What does that cost? The airplane manufacturer doesn't want to expose their database to their partners. They also don't want to write bespoke applications and services with their partners and doesn't really expect them to adapt to those interfaces that in turn front the database. None of this helps reconcile wtf happened across systems when sides disagree. Having a common distributed way to share a ledger is a valid problem to have and a blockchain is a valid way to solve that problem. Contracts further sweeten the pot.
- beckingz 5y ago
  For use cases like this, the automation needed to get the data into and out of a blockchain may make it a better solution than spreadsheets.
  - andyana 5y ago
    No.
galgalesh 5y ago
IBM's implementation is open source. They had a SaaS offering for this open source project on their cloud, which is what they're shutting down.
globular-toast 5y ago
I guess you haven't work at a large corporation that thinks it's a tech company then. I worked at a large insurance company and, while I was there, machine learning and AI were the strongest buzzwords going. Blockchain was just starting to emerge. If you were doing any project at all you could get automatic thumbs up from senior level execs if you name-dropped machine learning or AI. They'd enthusiastically nod their heads upon hearing it. I think this was supposed to convey "great application of this technology I understand!" but once you saw through that it really meant "I've heard of that!"
nickysielicki 5y ago
A bunch of talking heads went on CNBC over the past 5-10 years and talked about how existing cryptocurrencies like bitcoin were outlaw non-starters, but that "blockchain technology" was novel and here to stay, provided that governments and big banks would be able to retain control. Those people were and still are idiots, but there were enough of them to catch the attention of unimaginative MBAs at big unimaginative places like Microsoft and IBM -- to spawn products like these.

Delphiza 5y ago

Microsoft announced that they are retiring their blockchain project about two weeks before they announced Azure SQL Database ledger. So a centralised solution where parties are trusted - I think. https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/azure-sql/announcing-azure-sql-database-ledger/ba-p/2200401 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/azure-sql/announcing-...

muyuu 5y ago
seems like the engineers were allowed into the decision room
- DrAwdeOccarim 5y ago
  It's funny how true this may actually be. I had a 5 minute discussion with KOLs at my company back when etherium launched trying to square peg-round hole something in the business to run on it. We didn't have any luck. Ultimately, we wanted to own the database/data and if someone wanted to purchase from us/use our services they would have to trust us.
  - jules-jules 5y ago
    Why is it so difficult to spell Ethereum correctly?
    - 3PS 5y ago
      cat dict.txt | rg "ium$" | uniq | sed -z "s/\n/, /g" Who knows? Perhaps they thought it would be spelled more similarly to aluminium, ammonium, auditorium, calcium, compendium, cranium, delirium, emporium, encomium, equilibrium, eulogium, exordium, geranium, gymnasium, medium, millennium, odium, omnium, opium, opprobrium, pandemonium, potassium, premium, radium, sodium, tedium, uranium...
    - Craighead 5y ago
      Because it doesn't matter

funman7 5y ago

People are realizing what blockchain technology actually is now. When those ibm commercials came out promoting blockchain it felt awkward to watch like why are they talking like this

qeternity 5y ago
IBM getting involved in something is a pretty good indicator of where we are in the hype cycle, unfortunately.

kypro 5y ago

Is anybody aware of any interesting projects built on Microsoft's or IMB's blockchain tech?

dmitriid 5y ago
This question assumes there are any interesting projects on the blockchain.
2cb 5y ago
They're geared for enterprise so they're not exactly something you'd look to for "interesting projects." If you look at the smart contract platforms built on top of various cryptocurrencies, however, you will find plenty of active projects. Whether or not they're interesting to you, I can't promise anything. But there's plenty of use cases being explored from simple games to tokenised art to decentralised DNS replacements.

vmception 5y ago

in before someone says yield farming would make more sense in an MySQL database

2cb 5y ago
"Just stick it on a spreadsheet bro."

messutied 5y ago

Does anybody know some good real life examples of projects using blockchain? (other than cryptocurrencies of course) Whenever I tried to find some all I can find is proof of concepts, or new projects to evaluate the technology, but they never seem to consolidate. I feel like there should be more tangible and clearly successful examples by now, if the technology was really promising.

dmitriid 5y ago
> I feel like there should be more tangible and clearly successful examples by now, if the technology was really promising. Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain: https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/ten-years-in-nobody-has-come-up-with-a-use-case-for-blockchain-ee98c180100 https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/ten-years-in-nobody-has-c... And the followup, Blockchain is not only crappy technology but a bad vision for the future https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/decentralized-and-trustless-crypto-paradise-is-actually-a-medieval-hellhole-c1ca122efdec https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/decentralized-and-trustle...
accurrent 5y ago
Where I live, the tertiary institutions place your degree on a blockchain. TBH I have know idea why a simple digital signature would not suffice but I guess blockchain sounds cooler.
naraga 5y ago
Microsoft ION - Decentralized identity anchored in Bitcoin ledger. https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/identity-standards-blog/ion-we-have-liftoff/ba-p/1441555 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/identity-standards-bl...
- muyuu 5y ago
  yea but it's built on top of bitcoin, so basically not its own blockchain
  - naraga 5y ago

Uhrheber 5y ago

Obligatory xkcd link: https://xkcd.com/2030/ https://xkcd.com/2030/

mangecoeur 5y ago

I guess we've fallen off the end of the blockchain hype curve