Amazon Web Services (AWS) has joined the list of blockchain-as-a-service (BaaS) providers that already includes IBM, HP, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP.

As enterprises look to deploy the online distributed ledger technology, the industry's largest software and services providers have launched BaaS offerings as a way to allow customers to test the nascent technology without the capital costs or risk of deploying it in-house. The BaaS offerings also address a shortage of in-house blockchain developers, who are still in hot demand.

While Amazon's BaaS offering may seem like just another tool in the AWS box, the adoption of BaaS isn't going to look or function anything like the adoption of other cloud services, according to Michael Fauscette, chief research officer of G2 Crowd, a business-to-business software review site. "The use case ideas are really exploding around blockchain in a way that will drive in a wave of adoption that will happen faster than others," Fauscette said.

Earlier this month, ConsenSys announced Kaleido, a new blockchain business cloud service for enterprises. 

Amazon partnered with Kaleido to offer its cloud services on which to host an Enterprise Ethereum-based, open-source blockchain platform. That makes Kaleido the first managed blockchain SaaS available on AWS; it is available in AWS regions across the world.

"If blockchain doesn't become dramatically easier to use, then companieswill have to walk back their investments and our society will be far too slow in realizing blockchain's significant promise," Steve Cerveny, enterprise lead at ConsenSys and the founder of Kaleido, said in a statement. "We designed the Kaleido platform from scratch with new user experiences and tools to radically simplify the entire enterprise journey."