May 07 2018
07:38 AM
- last edited on
May 26 2021
01:23 PM
by
TechCommunityAP
May 07 2018
07:38 AM
- last edited on
May 26 2021
01:23 PM
by
TechCommunityAP
Hey folks,
Excited to share that this morning at Build we announced the release of Azure Blockchain Workbench (formerly App Builder)! Workbench is the fastest way to get started with blockchain on Azure and orchestrates services such as Azure Active Directory, Azure Key Vault, Azure SQLDB, Application Insights, Azure Functions and Service Bus around a pre-configured blockchain network and into a reference architecture that can be used to build a blockchain-based application. We’ve been working with a number of you all in our private preview the past months and really excited to get your feedback on new offering. Workbench is an easy-to-use tool with a simplified interface that enables users to create end-to-end blockchain applications leveraging the best of Azure. It comes equipped with sample cross-organizational workflows and smart contracts as well as an out of the box UI and admin experience that developers, ISVs and SI partners alike can use to drastically reduce development costs and accelerate time to value.
The Azure Blockchain Workbench provides the following key capabilities and differentiation factors:
Marc Mercuri from our engineering team did a great walkthrough on how to build your first smart contract with Workbench on Microsoft Mechanics.
Check out the link here.
For more information you can check out our announce blog and get your hands dirty with some great documentation, including get started guides, tutorials and sample workflows.
Let us know if you have thoughts or questions
Zeyad
May 08 2018 04:58 AM
Very interesting and I would love to try it.
At the end of the video they talk about hands-on labs where we could try it out in a demo environment.
Is it possible to share where I can find these labs?
Thank you,
Gerry
May 08 2018 08:04 AM
I believe the videos should be made available in the next week or so. Stay tuned.
May 10 2018 01:46 PM
Hi,
four (related) questions. Deploying Workbench includes the creation of a (currently ethereum) blockchain.
Thanks,
Christoph
May 10 2018 05:10 PM
Thanks for the great questions. Here are the answers to your questions:
May 11 2018 01:51 PM
@Zeyad Rajabi wrote:Is it possible to access the blockchaim via the standard RPC API?
- No, we turned off access to the RPC API for security. You can open access via the portal by modifying the network security group rules
Can you please outline how exactly to do this? Also I would add this to your documentation. This is all great but much more valuable if you can actually access the blockchain. Thanks it looks really interesting!
May 11 2018 02:11 PM
Good recommendation on the article. In the meanwhile, go to your resource group with the deployed Workbench. Select the network security group resource (note there are two, one is for the worker, which represents Workbench microservices). Modify the appropriate inbound security rules to allow access.
May 11 2018 02:23 PM
Hi Zeyad,
thanks for the fast answer! So as I understand it, for now it is great for PoCs. But using it in production is still some time away, correct?
Best
Christoph
May 11 2018 02:38 PM
We are working on hardening Workbench so it can be used for production. We would love to hear from customers on requirements for making Workbench ready for your production solutions. Feel free to post here or on user Voice:
May 11 2018 07:00 PM
Thanks for the suggestion but RPC and SSL ports seem to be already enabled but I still cannot connect to either. There must be more steps to enable access to the Ethereum VM's under the load balancer. Ideally I want to be able to connect to the eth nodes with putty as well as via an RPC client. Also I would be interested figuring out which AD account matches to which private keys if you are looking for material for a future blog.
Again thanks so much for the quick response.
May 12 2018 01:05 PM
Hi Michael,
The Ethereum VMs are completely locked down and only accessible via an internal IP. To access the SSH/RPC interface, I recommend first jumping on the Workbench VMs (they'll have "worker" in the VMSS name) and connection via the internal IP address of the Ethereum node VM.
Thanks,
Cody
May 14 2018 07:36 AM
Will give that a try. Thanks Cody!