Grant Fritchey does some explaining:
I’ve had people come up to me and say “PostgreSQL is open source and therefore license free. Why on earth would I put PostgreSQL in Azure?”
Honestly, I think that’s a very fair question. The shortest possible answer is, of course, you don’t have to. You can host your own PostgreSQL instances on local hardware, or build out VMs in Azure and put PostgreSQL out there, some other VM host, or maybe in Kubernetes containers, I mean, yeah, you have tons of options. So why PostgreSQL in Azure, and specifically, I mean the Platform as a Service offering? Let’s talk about it.
The biggest issue I’ve historically had with PostgreSQL or MySQL platform-as-a-service offerings in Azure is that Microsoft is always behind the release curve. With PostgreSQL, it’s not so bad—flexible server offers version 14.7, which is one major version behind Postgres itself (15) but at least the latest minor version. They’ve caught up on MySQL, but for a while, they were way behind.