If Amazon Can't Figure Out How To Make Money From Blockchain Databases, Nobody Can

Amazon is sunsetting QLDB; if you're a user, your only remaining option is to build it.

They just keep repeating, ‘go faster than any man in the history of space travel’. Like that’s a good thing. Like it would distract me from how insane their plan is. Yeah, ‘you have to go faster than any man in the history of space travel’. Because you’re launching me in a convertible. […]

Physicists, when describing things like acceleration, do not use the word ‘fast’. They’re only doing that in the hopes that I don’t raise any objections to this lunacy. Because I like the way ‘fastest man in the history of space travel’ sounds.

I do like the way it sounds. I like it a lot.

— The Martian (2015)

QLDB, RIP.

On the 31st of July, AWS will kill Quantum Ledger Database. If you were curious, you can’t sign up. And if you were a user, your data will disappear in August.

QLDB is going away completely.

This is worse than it sounds. The whole point of QLDB was its guarantee of integrity: the data was promised to remain where it was created, in the exact way it was at that moment. Now, by the act of moving it somewhere, that guarantee is simply lost.

Which is why migrating to another DBaaS is not viable. You trusted AWS with your most precious data, and that trust has evaporated. If you need what QLDB gave you, you can’t buy it from a vendor; you have to build it yourself.

As a result, understanding how to build ledgers has never been more valuable.

That’s why, in this special edition of The Payments Engineer Playbook, we’re going to dive deep, like really deep, into the basics of QLDB. So that you may be able to build it.

I’m stranded on Mars