AWS RDS instance upgrade downtime and more from our in-house experts.

At Bobcares, we offer solutions to every query that comes our way as a part of our AWS Support Service.

Let’s take a look at what our Support Team has to say about downtime during an AWS RDS instance upgrade.

What is AWS RDS instance upgrade downtime?

Have you come across a maintenance notification that indicates one of your AWS RDS DB instances requires maintenance? Well, our Support Engineers have come up with a couple of strategies to help you out.

In case you have been receiving errors while running the AWS CLI commands, check whether you are using the latest AWS CLI version or not.

Periodically, AWS performs maintenance to the operating system (OS), hardware, or database engine version for a DB cluster or instance.

You can check for pending maintenance events at the Events pane of the RDS console. After that, check for upcoming engine-specific maintenance events.

We can also run describe-pending-maintenance-actions to use the Amazon RDS API or AWS CLI DescribeDBInstances. We can also check Amazon RDS recommendations for upcoming maintenance.

AWS RDS instance upgrade downtime: Hardware maintenance

Prior to the maintenance, we will receive an email notification about the upcoming hardware maintenance windows. The email will also include affected Availability Zones and the time of the maintenance.

Our Support Engineers would also like to point out that the Single-AZ deployments are unavailable for a couple of minutes during hardware maintenance.

Moreover, multi-AZ deployments will be unavailable during the time for the instance to failover in case the Availability Zone is affected by the hardware maintenance.

Additionally, there is no downtime or failover if only the secondary Availability Zone has been affected.

AWS RDS instance upgrade downtime: OS maintenance

We can postpone scheduled maintenance by adjusting the preferred maintenance window. Furthermore, we can also defer maintenance by selecting Defer Upgrade in the Actions dropdown menu.

We can also minimize downtime by modifying the RDS DB instance to a Multi-AZ deployment.

In the case of Multi-AZ deployments, we will notice that the OS maintenance applies to the secondary instance initially. Moreover, if the instance fails over, the primary instance updates. The downtown occurs during the failover.

AWS RDS instance upgrade downtime: DB engine maintenance

Any upgrades to the DB engine level will require downtime. Moreover, in case the RDS DB instance uses a Multi-AZ deployment, the standby as well the primary instances are upgraded at the same time.

In other words, downtime occurs during the ongoing upgrade is over. The time duration usually depends on the size of the DB instance.

In case we upgrade the SQL Server DB instance, and it is in a Multi-AZ deployment, primary as well as standby instances are upgraded. Furthermore, Amazon RDS executes rolling upgrades, so we have an outage only during the duration of a failover.

[Looking for further assistance? We are here to lend a hand.]

Conclusion

In brief, we learned about downtime during an AWS RDS instance upgrade and how it comes about from the skilled Support Engineers at Bobcares.