A whole ton of trouble from the start. The first tutorial for deploying container in Azure for some reason thought it would be good to force readers to install local instance of Mongodb… which on windows did not go well.
Anyway, in the second tutorial the backend was using flexible postgres, but I ran again into the the old good pg_hba mess for logging in. Finally found that the proper way to connect with psql is like so:
psql '--host=pydepostgres.postgres.database.azure.com' '--port=5432' '--dbname=postgres' '--username=dknit' '--set=sslmode=require'
of course that only worked in cloud shell. I had to go add my ip to the db firewall to open the pipes.