Cloudsoft Spotlight - RDS End Of Support

In September 2023, AWS announced RDS Extended Support for Aurora and RDS.  This move by AWS allows AWS to continue to support RDS and Aurora versions of MySQL, and PostgreSQL beyond their end of support period from the providers of those databases (Oracle, Microsoft etc…).

What is extended support in AWS?

If you look from AWS’s perspective, it's important that software that has reached end of support from a vendor is upgraded.  This is because vendors stop providing patches and importantly security updates.  AWS needs to ensure that its customers are protected and using appropriate software.

Previously, when a product reached end of life then AWS were left with a challenge.  They would warn customers in plenty of time through alerts in the console and emails to the relevant contacts before an upgrade was forced.  I suspect that often these notices were lost or ignored until it was too late to plan.  This could cause significant issues for customers and possibly outages if an upgrade was forced upon them.

Now with extended support, AWS has provided an incentive.  If you move into Extended support, it costs and it costs a lot on your AWS bill.  For example if you are on MySQL extended support in the first year you will pay $0.118 per VCPU-hr.  If you were running a m6i.2xlarge (8 vCPU, 32GiB), with 300GB of storage, a relatively small database, then your costs would more than double from $534 to $1,118.

This works for AWS, now customers will certainly sit up and pay attention and plan for upgrades.  Unfortunately, if you are paying for extended support, it can put you in a position where you need to rush an upgrade to avoid these costs.

Cloudsoft advises reviewing the AWS documentation for the support dates and subscribing to RSS feeds to be notified when changes are made.  See the MySQL RDS Versions page and PostgreSQL Release calendar.  Please note that for databases such as SQL Server, forced upgrades will still happen.

Cloudsoft Spotlight for AWS

Cloudsoft can scan your AWS accounts and if we spot a version of RDS that will be moving to extended support, we’ll notify you.  We proactively monitor these calendars and our Spotlight tool can highlight extended support in good time.

If you have arrived here from the Cloudsoft Spotlight report, we have identified that you are either running on extended support or have a database with an end of support date identified. Please contact Cloudsoft if you need help with this.

This post is part of our Spotlight series where Cloudsoft experts use advanced tooling to look across your AWS estate for opportunities to optimize cost, increase security and take advantage of the latest innovations in AWS.  We let you focus on your business objectives by ensuring you use AWS effectively.