Choosing a major version for an RDS for PostgreSQL upgrade

Major version upgrades can contain changes that are not backward-compatible with previous versions of the database. New functionality can cause your existing applications to stop working correctly. For this reason, Amazon RDS doesn't apply major version upgrades automatically. To perform a major version upgrade, you modify your database manually. Make sure that you thoroughly test any upgrade to verify that your applications work correctly before applying the upgrade to your production databases. When you do a PostgreSQL major version upgrade, we recommend that you follow the steps described in How to perform a major version upgrade for RDS for PostgreSQL.

When you upgrade a PostgreSQL Single-AZ DB instance or Multi-AZ DB instance deployment to its next major version, any read replicas associated with the database are also upgraded to that next major version. In some cases, you can skip to a higher major version when upgrading. If your upgrade skips a major version, the read replicas are also upgraded to that target major version. Upgrades to version 11 that skip other major versions have certain limitations. You can find the details in the steps described in How to perform a major version upgrade for RDS for PostgreSQL.

Most PostgreSQL extensions aren't upgraded during a PostgreSQL engine upgrade. These must be upgraded separately. For more information, see Upgrading PostgreSQL extensions in RDS for PostgreSQL databases.

You can find out which major versions are available for your RDS for PostgreSQL database by running the following AWS CLI query:

aws rds describe-db-engine-versions --engine postgres  --engine-version your-version --query "DBEngineVersions[*].ValidUpgradeTarget[*].{EngineVersion:EngineVersion}" --output text

The following table summarizes the results of this query for all available versions. An asterisk (*) on the version number means that version is no longer supported. If your current version is unsupported, we recommend that you upgrade to the newest minor version upgrade target or to one of the other available upgrade targets for that version.

* This version is no longer supported.