Azure Blockchain Workbench now available as Public Preview!

[Zeyad Rajabi]

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:

• Easy and automatic creation of blockchain applications– Reduces blockchain application development time from months to weeks.
• Abstraction of blockchain “plumbing”–Users can configure and deploy a consortium network with just a few clicks. Ideal for dev/test scenarios Workbench’s automatic ledger deployment and network construction greatly reduces infrastructure development time.
• Automatic integration of blockchain application with non-blockchain services– Reduce development time and cost with prebuilt integrations to the cloud services needed for application development. Associate blockchain identities with Azure Active Directory (AD) for easier sign in and collaboration. Store secrets and keys securely with Azure Key Vault. Ingest and manage the messages and events required to trigger your smart contracts with Service Bus and Event Grid. Signing, hashing, and routing tools transform messages into the format expected by the blockchain’s native API. Synchronize on-chain data with off-chain storage and databases to more easily query attestations and visualize ledger activity.
• Extensible platform– Workbench is built to be modular and extensible. Microsoft customers and partners can easily integrate blockchain workflows with existing systems and applications leveraging Microsoft Flow and Logic Apps and extend capabilities with a REST-based API for client development and a message-based API for system-to-system integration.

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

[#2]

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

[#3]

I believe the videos should be made available in the next week or so. Stay tuned. 

[#4]

Hi,

four (related) questions. Deploying Workbench includes the creation of a (currently ethereum) blockchain.

• Is it possible to use another (ethereum) blockchain instance?
• Is it possible to add nodes to the generated blockchain instance?
• Is it possible to access the blockchaim via the standard RPC API?
•  In the docu there is a hint, that Proof of Authority is used, is this correct?

Thanks,

Christoph

[#5]

Thanks for the great questions. Here are the answers to your questions:

• Is it possible to use another (ethereum) blockchain instance?
  • Not yet, although this work is in our backlog
• Is it possible to add nodes to the generated blockchain instance?
  • Not via our API or UI at this time
• 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
•  In the docu there is a hint, that Proof of Authority is used, is this correct?
  • Yes, we are using Ethereum PoA

[#6]

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@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!

[#7]

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. 

[#8]

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

[#9]

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:

https://feedback.azure.com/forums/586780-blockchain 

[#10]

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.

[#11]

Done ;)

[#12]

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

[#13]

Will give that a try. Thanks Cody!