Despite previous rumors, Blockchain-based services will not be offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) anytime soon.
CEO Andy Jassy made the announcement at the AWS annual re:Invent conference held in Las Vegas in late November. Jassy presented his views on Blockchain technology, claiming there are limited use cases of Blockchain “beyond the distributed ledger.” He also reiterated the company’s policy not to “build technology because we think it is cool.”
According to Jassy, there are a number of other solutions to the problems that Blockchain is supposed to solve. He stressed that the majority of the distributed ledgers that are available so far have very limited capabilities.
However, Jassy has not completely shut the door on the possibility of working on a Blockchain-based product in the future. He claimed that they are interested in ways that Blockchain could benefit their customers:
“We are very intrigued by what customers are ultimately going to do there.”
AWS competitors’ Blockchain efforts
Unlike AWS, rivals such as Microsoft and International Business Machines (IBM) are aggressively advancing projects related to Blockchain services and distributed ledgers. Over the course of the last couple of months, these companies have launched several Blockchain services and pilot projects in collaboration with their customers.
Brief profile of AWS
AWS is a subsidiary of major online retailer Amazon.com. The company offers information technology infrastructure services in the form of web services to its customers. Among the firm’s products and solutions are storage and content delivery, cloud computing, databases, analytics, application services, and mobile services.