Automatic minor version upgrades for RDS for PostgreSQL

If you enable the Auto minor version upgrade option when creating or modifying a DB instance or Multi-AZ DB cluster, you can have your database automatically upgraded.

For each RDS for PostgreSQL major version, one minor version is designated by RDS as the automatic upgrade version. After a minor version has been tested and approved by Amazon RDS, the minor version upgrade occurs automatically during your maintenance window. RDS doesn't automatically set newer released minor versions as the automatic upgrade version. Before RDS designates a newer automatic upgrade version, several criteria are considered, such as the following:

You can use the following AWS CLI command to determine the current automatic minor upgrade target version for a specified PostgreSQL minor version in a specific AWS Region.

For Linux, macOS, or Unix:

aws rds describe-db-engine-versions \
--engine postgres \
--engine-version minor-version \
--region region \
--query "DBEngineVersions[*].ValidUpgradeTarget[*].{AutoUpgrade:AutoUpgrade,EngineVersion:EngineVersion}" \
--output text

For Windows:

aws rds describe-db-engine-versions ^
--engine postgres ^
--engine-version minor-version ^
--region region ^
--query "DBEngineVersions[*].ValidUpgradeTarget[*].{AutoUpgrade:AutoUpgrade,EngineVersion:EngineVersion}" ^
--output text

For example, the following AWS CLI command determines the automatic minor upgrade target for PostgreSQL minor version 16.1 in the US East (Ohio) AWS Region (us-east-2).

For Linux, macOS, or Unix:

aws rds describe-db-engine-versions \
--engine postgres \
--engine-version 16.1 \
--region us-east-2 \
--query "DBEngineVersions[*].ValidUpgradeTarget[*].{AutoUpgrade:AutoUpgrade,EngineVersion:EngineVersion}" \
--output table

For Windows:

aws rds describe-db-engine-versions ^
--engine postgres ^
--engine-version 16.1 ^
--region us-east-2 ^
--query "DBEngineVersions[*].ValidUpgradeTarget[*].{AutoUpgrade:AutoUpgrade,EngineVersion:EngineVersion}" ^
--output table

Your output is similar to the following.

----------------------------------
|    DescribeDBEngineVersions    |
+--------------+-----------------+
|  AutoUpgrade |  EngineVersion  |
+--------------+-----------------+
|  False       |  16.2           |
|  True       |  16.3          |
|  False       |  16.4           |
|  False       |  16.5           |
|  False       |  16.6           |
|  False       |  17.1           |
|  False       |  17.2           |
+--------------+-----------------+

In this example, the AutoUpgrade value is True for PostgreSQL version 16.3. So, the automatic minor upgrade target is PostgreSQL version 16.3, which is highlighted in the output.

A PostgreSQL database is automatically upgraded during your maintenance window if the following criteria are met:

For more information, see Automatically upgrading the minor engine version.