First, when you see public officials doing a blog post on "Microsoft.com" website instead of on a public website, you know that something fishy is going on...

On the other side, I have the feeling that this thing that clearly over-engineered. Just look at data their diagram... If I'm not wrong there is one writer and multiple reader for the data, or at least multiple writers on one side and multiple readers on another side, without a need for "real time" consistency.

So, this thing could probably have been better splitted to not have the use for "scaled" databases

> First, when you see public officials doing a blog post on "Microsoft.com" website instead of on a public website, you know that something fishy is going on...

Maybe, I'm naive, or not cynical enough, but I just read this as a case study of customer using Azure to provide the general public with information in a robust fashion.

In fact, if anything, the whole article is remarkably light on pushing Azure, and quite heavy on architecture details.

The open source code (on Github) uses Postgres (not MSSQL), and Python (not C# or Powershell), and in fact has a screen shot of Jetbrain's Pycharm, and not VSCode.

In fact it's probably quite an MS agnostic article.

Even though gov.uk is actually a really good IT company, I'm quite pleased that they're using "the cloud" rather than trying to create their own.

[1]: https://github.com/citusdata/citus

[2]: https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2019/01/24/microsoft-acquir...