Getty Images A wee while ago Ethereum’s chief technology officer Gavin Wood said in an interview that perhaps some large IT companies could use Ethereum as a marketing tool. Perhaps he was thinking about Microsoft which is now offering Blockchain as a service on the Azure cloud, in conjunction with ConsenSys, a provider of Ethereum applications. Microsoft is not the same company it was a couple of years ago. You could say it is going through a process of integration: a strategy to keep pace with what’s happening while ensuring the competition can work in tandem with its own technology. Azure now lets businesses run their software on Linux as well as Windows and it recently partnered with Docker to extend the latter’s "container" technology to Windows. Ethereum’s DevCon attendees may have been surprised to see Marley Gray, Microsoft’s director of technology strategy for financial services, running Ubuntu on Azure and referring to it as "the thing I’ve been using most lately". Broadly speaking, a momentous shift towards decentralisation is not an intuitive match for any company that behaves in an insular manner. But big change happens by degree, and in any case private blockchains are chimerical data beasts that probably straddle all possible worlds. IBTimes asked Microsoft if it sensed incommensurability of any kind with the emerging blockchain paradigm. "What is a cloud?" answered Gray, referring to decentralisation in general. "There is room for all sorts of models. Decentralisation works in different types of compositions and frameworks. In terms of how you decompose things, we see decentralisation and these applications and end points being very important. Computation at the edge is very important for a lot of different things. "But there are certain workloads where you really need scale and you need it in a distribution. You have […]
