You're right: It's not practical to run a blockchain on a single server or even just a collection of servers. For it to work properly it needs to be constructed as a P2P system. So each system that wants to use the blockchain has to participate in its construction.
What this framework appears to do is enable your endpoints to participate in a one-way fashion. So they will get just enough information to facilitate a transaction but nothing beyond that.
It seems like a bit of cloak & dagger tomfoolery where the blockchain is just being implemented behind-the-scenes on a specified collection of servers but I haven't looked very deep yet. I can see the benefit to Microsoft from having a setup like that--they can allow customers to participate in a blockchain-utilizing system without giving them full access to the blockchain but to me that seems like defeating the purpose and unnecessarily trusting a 3rd party to handle all your transactions with no independent way of verifying said transactions.
In other words, it's no different than just standard server-client architecture except instead of handling transactions through a database (the traditional way) they utilize a blockchain in the background. When you want to verify a transaction you're really just making a request to their central server and asking it to do the job for you--and trusting whatever it tells you.
What this framework appears to do is enable your endpoints to participate in a one-way fashion. So they will get just enough information to facilitate a transaction but nothing beyond that.
It seems like a bit of cloak & dagger tomfoolery where the blockchain is just being implemented behind-the-scenes on a specified collection of servers but I haven't looked very deep yet. I can see the benefit to Microsoft from having a setup like that--they can allow customers to participate in a blockchain-utilizing system without giving them full access to the blockchain but to me that seems like defeating the purpose and unnecessarily trusting a 3rd party to handle all your transactions with no independent way of verifying said transactions.
In other words, it's no different than just standard server-client architecture except instead of handling transactions through a database (the traditional way) they utilize a blockchain in the background. When you want to verify a transaction you're really just making a request to their central server and asking it to do the job for you--and trusting whatever it tells you.
Not exactly a proper blockchain if you ask me.