Enabling automatic upgrades between minor Aurora MySQL versions - Amazon Aurora

Enabling automatic upgrades between minor Aurora MySQL versions

For an Amazon Aurora MySQL DB cluster, you can specify that Aurora upgrades the DB cluster automatically to new minor versions. You do so by setting the AutoMinorVersionUpgrade property (Auto minor version upgrade in the AWS Management Console) of the DB cluster.

Automatic upgrades occur during the maintenance window. If the individual DB instances in the DB cluster have different maintenance windows from the cluster maintenance window, then the cluster maintenance window takes precedence.

Automatic minor version upgrade doesn't apply to the following kinds of Aurora MySQL clusters:

  • Clusters that are part of an Aurora global database

  • Clusters that have cross-Region replicas

The outage duration varies depending on workload, cluster size, the amount of binary log data, and if Aurora can use the zero-downtime patching (ZDP) feature. Aurora restarts the database cluster, so you might experience a short period of unavailability before resuming use of your cluster. In particular, the amount of binary log data affects recovery time. The DB instance processes the binary log data during recovery. Thus, a high volume of binary log data increases recovery time.

Note

Aurora only performs automatic upgrades if all DB instances in your DB cluster have the AutoMinorVersionUpgrade setting enabled. For information on how to set it, and how it works when applied at the cluster and instance levels, see Automatic minor version upgrades for Aurora DB clusters.

Then if an upgrade path exists for the DB cluster's instances to a minor DB engine version that has AutoUpgrade set to true, the upgrade will take place. The AutoUpgrade setting is dynamic, and is set by RDS.

Auto minor version upgrades are performed to the default minor version.

You can use a CLI command such as the following to check the status of the AutoMinorVersionUpgrade setting for all of the DB instances in your Aurora MySQL clusters.

aws rds describe-db-instances \
  --query '*[].{DBClusterIdentifier:DBClusterIdentifier,DBInstanceIdentifier:DBInstanceIdentifier,AutoMinorVersionUpgrade:AutoMinorVersionUpgrade}'

That command produces output similar to the following:

[
  {
      "DBInstanceIdentifier": "db-t2-medium-instance",
      "DBClusterIdentifier": "cluster-57-2020-06-03-6411",
      "AutoMinorVersionUpgrade": true
  },
  {
      "DBInstanceIdentifier": "db-t2-small-original-size",
      "DBClusterIdentifier": "cluster-57-2020-06-03-6411",
      "AutoMinorVersionUpgrade": false
  },
  {
      "DBInstanceIdentifier": "instance-2020-05-01-2332",
      "DBClusterIdentifier": "cluster-57-2020-05-01-4615",
      "AutoMinorVersionUpgrade": true
  },
... output omitted ...

In this example, Enable auto minor version upgrade is turned off for the DB cluster cluster-57-2020-06-03-6411, because it's turned off for one of the DB instances in the cluster.