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Upgrading Amazon Aurora DB clusters

With Amazon Aurora, you can control and test upgrades to your DB clusters. Amazon Aurora provides options for automatic minor version upgrades, manual upgrade control, required upgrades, and pre-upgrade testing. You can keep your clusters up-to-date with the latest minor version, deferring non-critical upgrades, forcing upgrades for serious issues, and validating upgrade behavior in nonproduction environments. The following sections detail how to manage and test Aurora DB cluster upgrades using these capabilities.

Automatic minor version upgrades for Aurora

Automatic minor version upgrades periodically update your database to recent database engine versions. However, the upgrade might not always include the latest database engine version. If you need to keep your databases on specific versions at particular times, we recommend that you manually upgrade to the database versions that you need according to your required schedule. In cases of critical security issues or when a version reaches its end-of-support date, Amazon Aurora might apply a minor version upgrade even if you haven't enabled the Auto minor version upgrade option. For more information, see the upgrade documentation for your specific database engine.

See Upgrading the minor version or patch level of an Aurora MySQL DB cluster and Performing a minor version upgrade.

You can stay up to date with Aurora minor versions by turning on Auto minor version upgrade for every DB instance in the Aurora cluster. Aurora performs the automatic upgrade only if all DB instances in your cluster have this setting turned on.

If Auto minor version upgrade is Yes for your DB cluster, Aurora upgrades automatically to the default minor version or to a newer minor version. For example, if the default minor version is 15.8 for Aurora PostgreSQL 15, and version 15.10 exists, the target for the automatic upgrade could be either 15.8 or 15.10.

Aurora typically schedules automatic upgrades twice a year for DB clusters that have automatic minor version upgrade enabled. These upgrades occur during the maintenance window that you specify for your cluster. For more information, see Automatic minor version upgrades for Aurora DB clusters.

Automatic minor version upgrades are communicated in advance through an Amazon RDS DB cluster event with a category of maintenance and ID of RDS-EVENT-0156. For more information, see Amazon RDS event categories and event messages for Aurora.

Manually controlling upgrades of your DB clusters to new versions

If you have the Auto minor version upgrade setting enabled, Aurora automatically upgrades your DB cluster to the default minor version or a newer minor version. Aurora typically schedules automatic upgrades twice a year for DB clusters that have the Auto minor version upgrade setting enabled. These upgrades are started during customer-specified maintenance windows.

To turn off automatic minor version upgrades, disable Auto minor version upgrade on any DB instance within an Aurora cluster. Aurora performs an automatic minor version upgrade only if all DB instances in your cluster have the setting enabled.

Because major version upgrades involve some compatibility risk, they don't occur automatically. You must initiate these, except if there is a major version deprecation. We recommend that you thoroughly test your applications with new database versions before upgrading your cluster to a major version.

For more information about upgrading a DB cluster to a new Aurora major version, see Upgrading Amazon Aurora MySQL DB clusters and Upgrading Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL DB clusters.

Required Amazon Aurora upgrades

For certain critical fixes, Aurora might perform a managed upgrade to a newer patch level within the same minor version. In this case, Aurora upgrades your cluster even if Auto minor version upgrade is turned off. Before doing so, Aurora communicates the detailed upgrade process. Details include the timing of certain milestones, the impact on your DB clusters, and recommended actions. Such managed upgrades occur automatically within the cluster maintenance window.

Testing your DB cluster with a new Aurora version before upgrading

You can test the upgrade process and how the new version works with your application and workload. Use one of the following methods:

For more information on these ways to create new clusters for testing, see Cloning a volume for an Amazon Aurora DB cluster and Creating a DB cluster snapshot.