Upgrading Amazon Aurora DB clusters

With Amazon Aurora, you can control and test upgrades to your DB clusters. Amazon Aurora provides options for automatic minor version upgrades, manual upgrade control, required upgrades, and pre-upgrade testing. You can keep your clusters up-to-date with the latest minor version, deferring non-critical upgrades, forcing upgrades for serious issues, and validating upgrade behavior in nonproduction environments. The following sections detail how to manage and test Aurora DB cluster upgrades using these capabilities.

Automatic minor version upgrades for Aurora

You can stay up to date with Aurora minor versions by turning on Auto minor version upgrade for every DB instance in the Aurora cluster. Aurora only performs the automatic upgrade if all DB instances in your cluster have this setting turned on. Auto minor version upgrades are performed to the default minor version.

We typically schedule automatic upgrades twice a year for DB clusters that have the Auto minor version upgrade setting set to Yes. These upgrades are started during the maintenance window that you specify for your cluster. For more information, see Automatic minor version upgrades for Aurora DB clusters.

Automatic minor version upgrades are communicated in advance through an Amazon RDS DB cluster event with a category of maintenance and ID of RDS-EVENT-0156. For more information, see Amazon RDS event categories and event messages for Aurora.

Manually controlling if and when your database cluster is upgraded to new versions

Auto minor version upgrades are performed to the default minor version. We typically schedule automatic upgrades twice a year for DB clusters that have the Auto minor version upgrade setting enabled. These upgrades are started during customer-specified maintenance windows. If you want to turn off automatic minor version upgrades, disable Auto minor version upgrade on any DB instance within an Aurora cluster. Aurora performs an automatic minor version upgrade only if all DB instances in your cluster have the setting enabled.

Because major version upgrades involve some compatibility risk, they don't occur automatically. You must initiate these, except in the case of a major version deprecation, as explained earlier. We always recommend that you thoroughly test your applications with new database versions before performing a major version upgrade.

For more information about upgrading a DB cluster to a new Aurora major version, see Upgrading Amazon Aurora MySQL DB clusters and Upgrading Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL DB clusters.

Required Amazon Aurora upgrades

For certain critical fixes, we might perform a managed upgrade to a newer patch level within the same minor version. These required upgrades happen even if Auto minor version upgrade is turned off. Before doing so, we communicate the detailed upgrade process. Details include the timing of certain milestones, the impact on your DB clusters, and the actions that we recommend that you take. Such managed upgrades are performed automatically. Each such upgrade is started within the cluster maintenance window.

Testing your DB cluster with a new Aurora version before upgrading

You can test the upgrade process and how the new version works with your application and workload. Use one of the following methods:

For more information on these ways to create new clusters for testing, see Cloning a volume for an Amazon Aurora DB cluster and Creating a DB cluster snapshot.