What is "in-place" about this? According to the docs you'll have ~10min downtime and you'll loose table statistics which is exactly what happens when you run pg_upgrade manually.

The biggest problem with all the cloud providers is that you won't know exactly when this 10 minute downtime window will start

I guess the only advantage here is that you don't have to do 9->10->11->12->13->14 like in the past and maybe that was one of the blockers Azure has. AWS allows to skip some major versions but 9->14 is not possible.

In-place is a separate concept from zero downtime. Similarly, an inplace upgrade of your OS doesn't mean you can continue using the OS during the upgrade; it means you get to keep your data without restoring from an external backup.

The benefit of an inplace upgrade for postgres is you don't have to spin up another server, restore from backup, and run pg_upgrade yourself.

Azure doesn't really offer migrations paths, and their database migration tool has a ton of edge cases (not supported over 1tb etc) so while pg_upgrade is nice, Azure doesn't really have a path to use that.

On top of that Azure postgres (limited to pg11) has essentially deprecated in place of their v2 Flexible tier with no official migration path.

Woah, this is great. Been waiting for this, since Cloud SQL has been very reliable in the past few years I've been using it, but upgrading was always a pain.