Danimir Ljepava takes us through user-initiated failover of SQL Managed Instances:
In August 2020, we have released a new feature user-initiated manual failover allowing to manually trigger a failover on SQL Managed Instance using PowerShell or CLI commands, or through invoking an API call.
Manually initiated failover on a managed instance will be an equivalent of the automated failover for high availability and software patches initiated automatically by the service. Manually invoking a failover on MI will help test end-to-end applications for fault resiliency on automatic failovers in case of planned or unplanned events before deploying to production. In addition to testing how failover impacts existing database sessions, it can also help verify if it changes the end-to-end performance due to changes in the network latency. In some cases if performance issues are encountered on SQL MI, manually invoking a failover to a new node can help mitigate the performance issue.
Read on to see how you can perform failover and how you can confirm that it worked.