Microsoft Azure appears to have scored a high-profile customer: Harvard University’s prestigious CS50 computer science class, not that anybody wants to talk about it.

A now-deleted web page on Microsoft’s Github account, originally posted in April, outlined a recent collaboration effort between Microsoft’s Azure team and an unnamed “major US research university.” The project deployed to Azure some internal applications that were previously running on Amazon Web Services and the school’s hardware, with help from Github and Codeship.

Certainly, lots of major U.S. research universities are working on modern development practices and cloud computing, but when the name of a famous computer science class is included in the URL — CS50.html — it’s not that hard to figure out who was being talked about.

CS50 is an introductory level computer science class at Harvard that has hosted guest lecturers such as Mark Zuckerberg, a Harvard dropout who nonetheless managed to make a decent living for himself. Its lead professor, David Malan, is a well-known speaker who actually filed for a trademark on “CS50,” causing a stir in Cambridge last year.

After GeekWire emailed him Monday about the Github page describing the collaboration, Malan wrote, “We’re actually still on AWS, though most every summer we do tend to re-evaluate our apps’ architecture for the coming year, with AWS, Azure, Google, et al. always among the candidates. So no plans yet, but happy to reach out toward summer’s end if we’ve made any decisions!”

Microsoft’s Github post was a bit more definitive about the use of Azure — saying, for example:

The staff want the ability to expand the class without expanding IT infrastructure. They want to scale their current container environment to the cloud so they can grow without acquiring and laying down significant additional hardware or upfront capital. They also have applications currently running in AWS but want to reduce lock-in and risk associated with having only one provider. … This project is a success. It streamlined the university’s deployment process and provided Codeship users with a well-documented solution to integrate Azure into their pipeline. By keeping detailed records of the steps taken to achieve our goals, Codeship was easily able to create new documentation on their site so that less work will need to be done in the future for any users wanting to use the same DevOps toolchain to automate their processes.

At some point after that email exchange Monday afternoon, the Github page was deleted, but the URL remains. And Google’s cache revealed the whole thing, excerpts of which you can read at the bottom of this post.

On Tuesday, Malan said he was out of the office, and referred inquiries to Senior Preceptor Doug Lloyd, who repeatedly called the Github post “overzealous” in its account of the work done between Harvard and Microsoft. However, Lloyd also said that he’s not involved in the day-to-day development process, and was not part of any discussions between Harvard and Microsoft.

Microsoft declined to comment in response to our inquiry.

It’s not entirely clear why Harvard would want to keep the project with Microsoft under wraps; it seems like a better topic of discussion than the widespread cheating scandal just uncovered in CS50. Sometimes companies and organizations have a policy of not talking about the tech vendors they use, but Malan and CS50 have been quite active on the conference circuit, speaking at DockerCon and AWS re:Invent last year.

Here are excerpts from the now-deleted post (the whole thing was over 3,000 words long):