Upgrading Amazon Aurora MySQL DB clusters

The type of upgrade that you do depends on how much downtime you can afford for your cluster, how much verification testing you plan to do, how important the specific bug fixes or new features are for your use case, and whether you plan to do frequent small upgrades or occasional upgrades that skip several intermediate versions. For each upgrade, you can change the major version, the minor version, and the patch level for your cluster. If you aren't familiar with the distinction between Aurora MySQL major versions, minor versions, and patch levels, you can read the background information at Checking Aurora MySQL version numbers.