Rebooting an Aurora cluster without read availability - Amazon Aurora

Rebooting an Aurora cluster without read availability

Without the read availability feature, you reboot an entire Aurora DB cluster by rebooting the writer DB instance of that cluster. To do so, follow the procedure in Rebooting a DB instance within an Aurora cluster.

Rebooting the writer DB instance also initiates a reboot for each reader DB instance in the cluster. That way, any cluster-wide parameter changes are applied to all DB instances at the same time. However, the reboot of all DB instances causes a brief outage for the cluster. The reader DB instances remain unavailable until the writer DB instance finishes rebooting and becomes available.

This reboot behavior applies to all DB clusters created in Aurora MySQL version 2.09 and lower.

For Aurora PostgreSQL this behavior applies to the following versions:

  • 14.6 and lower 14 versions

  • 13.9 and lower 13 versions

  • 12.13 and lower 12 versions

  • All PostgreSQL 11 versions

In the RDS console, the writer DB instance has the value Writer under the Role column on the Databases page. In the RDS CLI, the output of the describe-db-clusters command includes a section DBClusterMembers. The DBClusterMembers element representing the writer DB instance has a value of true for the IsClusterWriter field.

Important

With the read availability feature, the reboot behavior is different in Aurora MySQL and Aurora PostgreSQL: the reader DB instances typically remain available while you reboot the writer instance. Then you can reboot the reader instances at a convenient time. You can reboot the reader instances on a staggered schedule if you want some reader instances to always be available. For more information, see Rebooting an Aurora cluster with read availability.