AWS RDS instance upgrade down time [closed]

Answer 1

1, From personal experience it takes just short of one hour, to be precise 57min for 15 GB instance goign from small to large. Which I did not expect to be that long to be honest. update: just learned that switching point in time backup before upgrade speeds up the process significantly

2, I would say creating MULTI AZ before doing upgrade would do the trick, hopefully that does not have downtime as well. Question is do they allow upgrading one without other...

3, yes, but I'm not 100% sure though

Answer 2

db.t1.micro > db.m1.small : 8m30s

Engine:    mysql
Storage:    6GiB
Backups:    Yes
Multi A-Z:  No

The size/type of the database do appear to affect the downtime significantly.

Answer 3

I don't think this is an on-topic question for StackOverflow at all, but some information anyway:

1. It's significant and depends on the size of the database. I've had it take an hour or more some times. I've also had creating snapshots, restoring from snapshots, and multi-az creation take around two hours before.

2. It depends on how you have things configured now. If you have Multi-AZ already enabled, then an instance upgrade will actually occur on the slave, then a failover will occur, then the new slave is updated. This results in about 1 or 2 minutes of actual downtime. The instance upgrade on the slave usually takes around 10 to 20 minutes, but there is no downtime in this setup. Note that when it does the failover, Amazon does a DNS swap internally so that your RDS endpoint points to the right machine, so you may have to restart your web processes that point to the DB so that they reconnect to the DB and pull in the new IP from a new DNS lookup.