Azure Blockchain service is shutting down: Here's why Staex is the best blockchain management platform for your business.

2021-08-09

Now that Microsoft shuts down its blockchain service Staex swarm clouds can take the pain out of running blockchains.

Blockchain consortia for business are notoriously hard to initiate and manage. Unifying infrastructure between multiple parties' backends and clouds is an incredibly difficult process, with firewalls, NATs, and business logic standing in the way. Operations are also difficult; nodes between different parties must be in sync with each other (from a configuration perspective) and all parties must ensure similar uptimes and updates to their systems. Additionally adding or removing consortium members complicates the operations of such a blockchain system even more. With these problems and countless others, it is clear why Azure offered a blockchain deployment and consortia management platform to its customers.

Now, however, that Microsoft is shuttering this service, you might be looking for an alternative to which to migrate. Luckily, Staex Swarm Clouds offer a best-in-class solution for blockchain consortia management and operations.

Staex Swarm Clouds are a P2P network enabling the orchestration of software between any cloud, on-premise server, or device, and they can be used to create a consortium of parties for shared business cases. Staex Swarm Clouds can be set up with zero configuration needed and can deploy consortial blockchains in only a few clicks, removing the need for complex and deep knowledge of the blockchain being deployed, so that your developers can spend more time developing your applications.

Staex swarm clouds can take the pain out of running blockchains by providing the following features.

• Remote Node Management: Blockchain nodes distributed across your partners can be started, stopped, and controlled by authorized consortium members, even if they lie on another organization's hardware.
• Firewalls and Networking Configurations: Complex networking between your partners is simplified with Staex's networking agent staexMCC, which creates a P2P overlay network, effectively creating a single environment across clouds, on-premise servers, or field devices. NAT traversals and firewalls are handled with zero configuration out-of-the-box.
• Mutual Administration: Staex provides granular administration controls to authorize parties to manage the Staex Swarm Cloud and the blockchain deployments on it. New consortium administrators can be added and removed at any time with no downtime on the network.
• Multi-organizational Deployments: Staex's decentralized provisioning agent staexD and Staex's blockchain registry staexHUB, your blockchain infrastructure can be shared with other partners in your consortia securely through deployment consensus and synchronous state updates.
• Complex Management of Infrastructure Responsibilities: In consortial blockchain deployments, infrastructure responsibilities between data center providers and the blockchain providers are blurry. With Staex, you can use the distributed administration tools and the simplified networking together to clearly define roles for the infrastructure.
• Blockchain Key Management: Staex offers a wallet service, which can securely store keys and retrieve them for usage if a blockchain node starts or must be restored.
• Unified Blockchain API for Developers: Switching between blockchains for storage, payment, or smart contracts, should not require a massive overhaul of client-side applications. With Staex's blockchain connectors, your developers can use one unified REST API to interact with blockchains. If the blockchain in the backend is changed, the front-end implementation stays the same.

Staex Swarm Clouds are an easy-to-use, complete, and fully distributed solution for consortial blockchain deployment management. Staex can be the painkiller for your complex blockchain systems and easily enable consortial use cases between you and your partners.

Interested? Schedule a demo with us here.

Staex is a secure public network for IoT devices that can not run a VPN such as smart meters, IP cameras, and EV chargers. Staex encrypts legacy protocols, reduces mobile data usage, and simplifies building networks with complex topologies through its unique multi-hop architecture. Staex is fully zero-trust meaning that no traffic is allowed unless specified by the device owner which makes it more secure than even some private networks. With this, Staex creates an additional separation layer to provide more security for IoT devices on the Internet, also protecting other Internet services from DDoS attacks that are usually executed on millions of IoT machines.

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