In this article, Ava Labs team shares the journey of creating AvaCloud, highlighting its role in the evolving landscape of SaaS solutions and its mission to transform how businesses adopt and utilize blockchain technology. The team discusses the origins of AvaCloud, how it draws inspiration from established SaaS models, and the unique ways it simplifies and accelerates the deployment of blockchain solutions for businesses.

AvaCloud: Simplifying Web3 for Businesses

AvaCloud was directly inspired by the cloud computing boom of the early 2000s, and in fact, there are many parallels between where we are in Web3 today and where Internet technology companies were during that era. At Ava Labs, we saw a similar need for faster time to market, more automated infrastructure, and easier deployment of blockchain tech. Rather than remake the wheel, we decided to take some of the lessons from the early Internet and apply them to blockchain. As a result, AvaCloud is a robust yet accessible solution, influenced and inspired by the best practices of industry leaders like Google Cloud and Alibaba Cloud. 

“AvaCloud is a fully managed service meets SaaS product.”

AvaCloud is designed to be an intersection of a fully managed service and a SaaS product. Think Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Shopify - just as these familiar platforms allow anyone to spin up computing infrastructure or an online shop with very few technical hurdles, AvaCloud allows you to spin up your own custom blockchain without any code. You’re going to be able to bring your business on-chain without a team of engineers, thanks to AvaCloud’s no-code portal which is as easy as clicking a couple of buttons. Plus, through Ava Labs, you have access to a team of experts, including implementation engineers and product managers to help give you guidance about the process along the way. 

“A fully configurable Layer 1 blockchain in a no-code experience.”

The goal from the beginning was to create a no-code experience where creating a blockchain, customizing, and scaling it was as simple as deploying a website through a platform like Squarespace. We did not want someone to have to bring on a full-stack engineering team - the idea was that even an entrepreneur without a programming background could easily get their own chain up and running to support a blockchain-based application. In terms of the total package, AvaCloud offers a fully configurable Layer 1 blockchain that has all the benefits of the Avalanche network. With a few clicks and buttons you can set up a dedicated chain, complete with validators, a native coin, and a number of custom configurations – all without code. There's really no other product that's able to deliver this in a no-code experience. This ensures that businesses don't have to compromise on capabilities while still enjoying a user-friendly interface. 

Leveraging the Power of the Avalanche Blockchain

For businesses entering into the world of Web3, it’s helpful to understand the concept of a monolithic blockchain. Let’s take Ethereum for example, which is often described using the metaphor of a ‘world computer’ - imagine a giant computer that is owned and transacted on by people all over the world, which means that everybody involved has to share it. The problem is that computing power has limitations, so if everybody wants to use the computer at the same time, it’s either going to be very expensive or very slow. Avalanche, in contrast, is not monolithic. It acts as a web of blockchains, kind of like the Internet, where people can build their own chain for a specific purpose. On Avalanche, this “blockchain of blockchains” approach is accomplished via ‘subnets,’ which facilitate the creation of customized blockchains. AvaCloud simply automates the process of creating your own chain on the Avalanche network. This level of customizability and adaptability is critical in an enterprise or government context, where you need to account for compliance and regulatory requirements. 

“Interoperability plays a big role in creating valuable networks.”

Many of us are familiar with the idea of network effects, and the notion that the value of a network increases exponentially with the number of participants or nodes in that network. When we think about blockchain technology in a business context, we’ve often seen approaches that create siloed networks that don’t have an interoperability standard, and so cannot easily interact with any other network. This dramatically limits the potential value of the network. But when you build on Avalanche through AvaCloud, you have a native interoperability solution that allows you to connect to all the other applications and blockchains being built in the Avalanche ecosystem. Not to mention, AvaCloud users also get all the technical benefits of the Avalanche network, including its innovative consensus technology, extremely fast time to finality, and all of the developer tooling, support, and security.

How Businesses Are Driving Innovation with AvaCloud

While we are seeing a number of transformative use cases with AvaCloud across industries, including gaming, institutional finance, and government, we’re particularly excited by what’s happening in the enterprise loyalty space. On-chain loyalty is a transformative concept. The systems are already in place and these loyalty programs are massive with millions of users – it’s really not too much of a lift to bring the tech on-chain and have consumers see an immediate benefit. This year we worked with SK Planet, one of South Korea’s largest information and communications technology platforms, to create a Web3 portal for its millions of users. When you incorporate blockchain technology into a loyalty rewards program, suddenly the points that are used to verify the program are truly ownable and tradable, as well as the assets you receive from using the program. By embedding loyalty mechanisms directly into the blockchain, platforms can foster stronger community engagement and retention. 

Crawl, Walk, Run - Supporting Businesses on their Blockchain Journey

Not only does AvaCloud remove the complexities of spinning up and operating a blockchain, but we're also making it a one-stop shop for all your needs when building a blockchain-based application or business. When our clients come to AvaCloud they meet with our implementation leaders for a consultation process. We take the time to sit down and understand what their needs are from a technical perspective, but also from a product and business perspective. The product, strategy, and implementation experts on our Ava Studios team are there to help our clients every step of the way. 

Whenever I meet teams who are thinking about integrating blockchain into their operations, I encourage them to carefully examine both the tech stack and the team that they’re considering working with. In the Web3 world, you’ll likely encounter people throwing money around, building flashy technology and making really big promises about the future. The biggest trap people fall into is thinking complexity equals quality. But at Ava Labs we prefer to keep things simple and build technology that is fundamentally sound from the ground up, that is made to scale and work for businesses. And that is why we built AvaCloud.

About AvaCloud

AvaCloud is a managed blockchain service enabling teams to rapidly build, deploy, and scale decentralized networks–customized for any use case. In minutes, launch robust blockchain networks with 50k+ transactions per second, sub-second transaction finality, and net-zero carbon impact. AvaCloud features a no-code portal, automated infrastructure, network monitoring, and 24/7 customer support. Stop worrying about your blockchain infrastructure, and start growing your business and maximizing your revenue.
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About Ava Labs

Ava Labs makes it simple to deploy high-performance solutions for Web3, led by innovations on Avalanche. The company was founded by Cornell computer scientists, who partnered with Wall Street veterans and early Web3 leaders to execute a promising vision for redefining the way people build and use open, permissionless networks. Ava Labs is redefining the way people create value with Web3. 

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