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2026-05-27 — FAQ: clarify who downloads BLAST databases from NCBI

Motivation

A recurring question from operators and reviewers: when a user clicks "Download" on a BLAST database card, does the work happen on the api sidecar, the terminal sidecar, or inside the AKS cluster? The existing FAQ in docs/index.md covered SAS posture and sign-in but not the prepare-db data path, so the answer was buried in api/routes/storage/prepare_db.py.

User-facing change

Added one Q&A to the home-page Frequently Asked Questions section (rendered + FAQPage JSON-LD), placed right after the SAS posture question:

Who actually downloads BLAST databases from NCBI — the api sidecar, the terminal sidecar, or AKS?

None of them transfer the bytes. The api sidecar's POST /api/storage/prepare-db route orchestrates the work by issuing per-file Azure Blob server-side copies (start_copy_from_url) from the public NCBI BLAST S3 mirror straight into the workload Storage account's blast-db container. Azure Storage itself performs the copy …

API / IaC diff summary

  • Docs only. No code, no Bicep, no route changes.
  • docs/index.md — added the question to both the jsonld: frontmatter (FAQPage.mainEntity) and the visible ## Frequently Asked Questions section.

Validation

  • uv run mkdocs build --clean — clean build, 0 warnings (plugin upsell line excluded from grep).
  • Parsed the generated site/index.html and confirmed the FAQPage JSON-LD now lists 7 questions including the new "Who actually downloads BLAST databases from NCBI …" entry, and that the same string is present in the rendered HTML body.