Microsoft has officially launched a cloud-based blockchain platform, introducing Ethereum Blockchain as a Service (EBaaS) on its Azure cloud. The company partnered with Brooklyn-based ConsenSys to bring enterprise-grade Ethereum tools to developers and organizations.
The new offering provides two primary tools designed to help enterprises and developers build smart contract–based applications. The first is Ether.Camp, an integrated development environment tailored for creating and testing decentralized applications. The second is BlockApps Strato, a private or semi-private Ethereum environment that can be connected to the public Ethereum network as needed.
Targeted at financial institutions and other enterprises, the service aims to lower barriers to experimentation by providing a ready-made development, test, and production environment. Marley Gray, Microsoft’s director of technology strategy for U.S. financial services, explained that the platform lets organizations “play, learn, and fail fast at a cost” in a managed setting.
Gray said Microsoft chose Ethereum over Bitcoin because Ethereum offers greater flexibility and extensibility for building decentralized applications. While Bitcoin has clear value as a cryptocurrency, Ethereum’s smart contract capabilities and active developer community make it a better fit for many enterprise use cases. With the maturity of the Ethereum protocol and its growing ecosystem, Microsoft saw an opportunity to provide a practical, enterprise-focused on-ramp.
At DEVCON1, an Ethereum developer conference in London that Microsoft sponsored, Gray told Reuters the platform supports a “fail fast, fail cheap” approach. EBaaS enables organizations to create private blockchains where smart contracts automatically enforce the terms of agreements, reducing development friction and operational risk.
“Working with our customers that wanted to start playing around with blockchain technology, the major pain point that we kept hearing from them was that it was just too hard to get started, and too expensive,” Gray said. EBaaS aims to address those concerns by offering an accessible cloud-based solution that simplifies deployment and lowers initial costs.
The partnership with ConsenSys reinforces Microsoft’s enterprise blockchain strategy. ConsenSys, founded by Joseph Lubin—one of the Ethereum Foundation’s co-founders—is a venture production studio focused on building decentralized applications and developer tools for Ethereum. The collaboration combines Microsoft’s cloud capabilities with ConsenSys’s deep Ethereum expertise to offer scalable, enterprise-ready blockchain solutions.
Andrew Keys, Director of Enterprise Business Development at ConsenSys, said the relationship with Microsoft strengthens ConsenSys’s ability to deliver scalable blockchain solutions to organizations. “We’ve found Azure to be an efficient and powerful cloud to deploy our offerings and are looking forward to further collaboration with Microsoft,” he added.
By integrating Ethereum tooling into Azure, Microsoft aims to make blockchain technology more approachable for enterprises, particularly in finance. The EBaaS offering provides a managed environment for experimentation, development, and production, helping organizations prototype faster and move toward production-ready blockchain deployments without the complexity of managing the underlying infrastructure.
Image credit: Microsoft booth at the Consumer Electronics Show 2009, Wikipedia.