Oracle Shakes Up Blockchain Cloud Service Pricing And Backup

Oracle has announced updates to its blockchain platform cloud service, including leveraging its own cloud infrastructure and changes to the way it charges.

"With this release, Oracle advances the Oracle Blockchain Platform to a new level of dynamic scalability, high availability, and quick deployment for enterprise blockchain applications running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure," Oracle group VP of blockchain product development Frank Xiong said.

"It's designed and developed to meet our customers' growing demand for a more resilient, secure, and scalable platform that's ready for growing workloads of enterprise blockchain applications in numerous use cases across various industries."

According to Oracle, customers are "increasingly" moving blockchain applications into production, with the company being required to up capacity at its end to cope with the increased transaction volumes.

"This new release responds to their needs with increased resilience and even higher availability, dynamic scale-up and scale-out to handle ever growing workloads, stronger access controls for sharing confidential information, superior price/performance, greater decentralisation capabilities for blockchain consortiums, and stronger auditability when rich history database feature is used in conjunction with Oracle Database Blockchain Tables," the company wrote in a post.

See also: Blockchain and business: Looking beyond the hype

With this release, the transaction-based pricing model is also changing to an OCPU-hour plus storage metric. As well as support for "bring your own licence" pricing, which enables customers with on-premises Oracle Blockchain Platform Enterprise Edition licences to use them instead for a cloud deployment.

The new release also automatically deploys and replicates a user's components across three Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Availability Domains. It's also added "geo-redundant ordering", combining deployments added across different regions.

Oracle is now also offering a new blockchain consensus mechanism based on RAFT protocol, which it touted as supporting greater decentralisation for business networks and enabling multiple participants to run and contribute to nodes to the network.

Other enhancements in this release include the ability to choose between development-oriented Standard SKU and production-grade Enterprise SKU, on-demand storage capacity, on-chain access control capability for smart contract developers to manage access permissions, an operations audit log for control plane operations, and history database support, allowing off-chain transaction updates into Oracle Database Blockchain Tables.

Oracle made its blockchain cloud service generally available in mid-2018.

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