There is a diverse landscape of solutions and approaches to implement a blockchain. Figure 10.3 represents a broad classification of such approaches. Blockchain-as-a-service is an industry practice that merges the development platform approach with the IT services approach to provide tangible blockchain-based solutions to clients:
Figure 10.3: Blockchain implementation solution
We have seen in the previous chapters that we need several software components, such as geth, node.js, and Java runtime environments along with programming tools, such as, Solidity and web.js, on top of an operating system to develop a complete end-to-end, blockchain-based, decentralized application from scratch.
This is fine for making a new and highly customized product to a certain extent, but to implement a repeatable and scalable service, coding from scratch is equivalent to reinventing the wheel.
The big players in the cloud computing industry, such as IBM (Bluemix), Microsoft (Azure), and...