Vitalik Buterin: "Microsoft has embraced the open community of blockchain developers" on Ethereum

On May 7th, Microsoft announced the Azure Blockchain Service, a tool that helps developers and companies create, deploy, and manage blockchain networks.

At the Build, Microsoft's marquee developer conference that occurred in Seattle on May 7th, 2019, CEO Satya Nadella and the Azure Blockchain team doubled down on this vision to simplify adoption of blockchain technology.

Chinese electronics firm Xiaomi-China's largest smartphone company-highlighted how they were using Microsoft's blockchain offerings to track their products throughout their supply chain.

According to Mark Russinovich, CTO at Azure, Microsoft's customers such as Starbucks and Xiaomi led to the development of the Azure Blockchain Service as "Many of enterprise customers were overwhelmed."

This explanation came in a session where Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum, joined him on stage to highlight Microsoft's work with the blockchain platform.

Quorum offers Microsoft's customers the ability to manage their blockchain networks like they would any other private network within their business.

Microsoft furthered its mission to simplify blockchain development by creating a Visual Studio Code Azure Blockchain extension.

This allows developers to continue to use the tools they are familiar with to develop on top of the blockchain.

"Microsoft has embraced the open community of blockchain developers and has brought the best of their cloud development tooling to the developers building the next wave of decentralized applications. With Azure Blockchain Services and Ethereum integrations for tools like VS Code, Microsoft is demonstrating its commitment to open blockchain development."

As Microsoft continues to build what resembles a PaaS offering for blockchain development, it will be interesting to see how the general community embraces such products.