[greatgib]

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

[sdoering]

> 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...

The article states it was written by Claire Giordano from San Francisco. Not sure where you got the UK Government official from.

To me it read like a b2b marketing piece and showcase. Kind of: We can power this, so we can power your BI dashboard as well.

Taking this into account it was a nice write up and from a data analyst's and consultant's pov interesting to read.

[Rastonbury]

Coming from consulting, this is exactly what it is - from a pure engineering standpoint it may be lacking but if you've read any other 'case study' targeted as business people this goes really deep. Normally it's SEO fodder crammed with jargon and buzzwords

[arsome]

It definitely had a bit of a marketing tone, but it was focused on what's ultimately an open source product you can run pretty much anywhere, from a different cloud provider to your own bare metal, they just happened to use it on Azure.

[greatgib]

Indeed I did not check the bio of the article writer, but when you read:

<<As a result, the GOV.UK Coronavirus dashboard became one of the most visited public service websites in the United Kingdom.>>

You don't expect the gov UK dashboard to be done us consultants...

[DrBazza]

> 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.

[samhw]

> Even though gov.uk is actually a really good IT company

For anyone who's wondering, the relevant team here is GDS[0]. We hired a bunch of engineers from there at one of my previous companies - which was doing some quite gnarly technical work - and they were superb. I believe the US equivalent is 18F.

[0] The Government Digital Service in full, but no definite article for the initialism.

[ghassanmas]

To be accurte, it's not completely Micrsoft agnostic, it make use case for a PSQL extension citus[1], the company behind this extension has been acquired by Microsoft two years ago[2].

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

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

[StringyBob]

Not as much tech detail, but for an alternative source, here’s an intro by the team dashboard lead - https://ukhsa.blog.gov.uk/2022/01/20/reporting-the-vital-sta...

Also - I’ve been really impressed by the openness of the team actually doing the work - eg threads like https://twitter.com/pouriaaa/status/1476892793729654787

and in particular this analysis of debugging a problem that the dashboard encountered - which also gives a lot more background context: https://dev.to/xenatisch/cascade-of-doom-jit-and-how-a-postg...