Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), has announced the general availability of Amazon Quantum Ledger Database (QLDB), a fully managed service that provides a high-performance, immutable, and cryptographically verifiable ledger for applications that need a central, trusted authority to provide a permanent and complete record of transactions across industries like retail, finance, manufacturing, insurance, and human resources.
Amazon QLDB
The service offers familiar database capabilities that make it easy to use, and its document-oriented data model is flexible, enabling customers to store structured and unstructured data in the ledger. There are no upfront commitments to use Amazon QLDB, and customers pay for what they use.
Amazon QLDB is a new class of database that provides a high-performance, immutable, and cryptographically verifiable ledger that customers can use to build applications that act as a system of record, where multiple parties are transacting with a centralized, trusted entity. The service removes the need to build complex audit functionality into a relational database or rely on the ledger capabilities of a blockchain framework.
“For years, AWS has been using an internal version of Amazon QLDB to store configuration data for some of its most critical systems, and has benefitted from being able to view an immutable history of changes. Over time, our customers have asked us for the same ledger capability, and a way to verify that the integrity of their data is intact. Today, we are proud to announce Amazon QLDB, offering customers a fully managed service that provides the same ledger capabilities, along with the ability to cryptographically verify data integrity. We are excited to see customers streamline their operations and enhance their customer and partner experiences by using Amazon QLDB to do things like keep track of credit and debit transactions across customer bank accounts and reconcile data between supply chain systems to track the complete manufacturing history of a product.”
– Shawn Bice, VP, Databases, Amazon Web Services, Inc.
All transactions must comply with atomicity, consistency isolation, and durability (ACID) to be logged in the journal, and cannot be deleted or modified. All changes are cryptographically chained and verifiable in a history that customers can analyze using familiar SQL queries.
Amazon QLDB is serverless, so customers don’t have to provision capacity or configure read and write limits. They simply create a ledger, define tables, and Amazon QLDB will automatically scale to support application demands, and customers pay only for the reads, writes, and storage they use.
Unlike the ledgers in common blockchain frameworks, Amazon QLDB does not require distributed consensus, so it can execute two to three times as many transactions in the same time as common blockchain frameworks.
“We’re building our own banking platform from the ground up. We need this platform to be scalable, compliance-friendly, cost-effective, and have real-time capabilities. To support this platform, we needed a cryptographically-verifiable and immutable transaction log at the core. We experimented with blockchain earlier this year and realized that a decentralized ledger did not really meet our needs as it was too complicated to operate and not sufficiently performant. With the release of Amazon QLDB we can leverage the AWS’s investment in a centralized ledger database to solve that problem, allowing us to focus our engineers on other, customer-centric aspects of the platform.”
– Ziad Sawalha, VP Engineering of Core Banking, Klarna Bank
Klarna Bank is one of Europe’s largest banks, providing payment solutions to 60 million consumers across 130,000 merchants in 14 countries.
