Amazon Web Services Inc. Tuesday announced general availability of its Amazon Quantum Ledger Database, which is a managed blockchain service that provides an immutable, cryptographically verifiable ledger for applications that require a central trusted authority.

Amazon announced AWS QLDB at its re:Invent conference late last year. It was introduced alongside Amazon Managed Blockchain, which is a service that lets users create fully managed and scalable blockchain networks based on Ethereum or HyperLedger technology.

Amazon QLDB is more of a do-it-yourself, centralized service companies can use to maintain a permanent record of transactions. For example, it can be used to keep track of credit and debit transactions associated with bank accounts, or to track the manufacturing history of a product.

The service is simple to get up and running thanks to its familiar database capabilities, and its document-oriented data model means it can be used to store both structured and unstructured data, Amazon said.

Constellation Research Inc. analyst Holger Mueller said it was important for Amazon, and other cloud providers, to provide a way for customers to build blockchains as they are a key enabler of next-generation applications, which are exclusively built in the cloud.

“Today it is Amazon Web Services turn to make its blockchain service generally available, and this is always an important milestone for any product,” Mueller said. “Conservative CxOs who don’t want to be beta testers now have the reassurance of a fully and generally available product. It’s still a version one though, so caution is always a good consideration when adopting new technologies.”

Even so, Amazon said big companies including Accenture Plc. and Splunk Inc. are already running Amazon QLDB in production.

The service is being made available from today in Amazon’s US East (Ohio), US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Tokyo) and EU (Ireland) regions, with wider availability to come soon.

Rahul Pathak, general manager of big data, data lakes and blockchain at AWS, and Shawn Bice, vice president of nonrelational databases at AWS, appeared on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s mobile livestreaming studio at re:Invent last year, where they discussed how Amazon QLDB makes blockchain easier for companies to implement:

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