AWS's Blockchain is NOT A Blockchain
Have a look at the following offerings:
1. AWS Blockchain - https://aws.amazon.com/blockchain/ - An excerpt from the page - "Blockchain technologies are often used to solve two types of customer needs. In the first case, multiple parties work with a centralized, trusted authority to maintain a complete and verifiable record of transactions." - WHAT, REALLY?!
2. Azure Blockchain - https://azure.microsoft.com/en-in/solutions/blockchain/
What are they really selling? - A 2018 post by Consensys comes to mind - https://media.consensys.net/blockchain-vs-distributed-ledger-technologies-1e0289a87b16 - this neatly distinguishes b/w blockchain and other distributed ledger technologies (DLT) - Corda & Hyperledger & discusses each's capabilities and limitations.
AWS & Azure blockchain offerings basically allow you to setup Corda, Hyperledger & other DLTs in the cloud. It's not hard to see why they want you to do this - basically just like every other application, DLTs require compute, network and lots of storage. Not to forget cross-selling analytics services. But does it really require the biggest cloud providers to misrepresent blockchain tech?
R3's Corda uses intermediaries called notaries to establish trust and the notary service provides consensus as a pluggable component. Hyperledger's orderer service provides consensus as a pluggable component too.
Now most business use cases listed with the aforementioned cloud offerings could easily be powered with Crash fault tolerance (CFT) consensus (like Raft) and Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT) consensus (like PoW) would be an overkill. And if I'm only using their cloud offering in a DLT with CFT consensus configuration, I'd be better off using a more mature distributed database technology instead. So what's the point of all this AWS/Azure blockchain hoo-ha anyway?
Am I missing something here?