Are Amazon RDS instances upgradable?

Question

Will I am able to switch (I mean upgrade or downgrade) Amazon RDS instance on need basis or do I have to create a new afresh and go through migration?

Answer 1

Yes, Amazon RDS instances are upgradeable via the modify-db-instance command. There is no need for data migration.

From the Amazon RDS Documentation:

"If you're unsure how much CPU you need, we recommend starting with the db.m1.small DB Instance class and monitoring CPU utilization with Amazon's CloudWatch service. If your DB Instance is CPU bound, you can easily upgrade to a larger DB Instance class using the rds-modify-db-instance command.

Amazon RDS will perform the upgrade during the next maintenance window. If you want the upgrade to be performed now, rather than waiting for the maintenance window, specify the --apply-immediately option. Warning: changing the DB Instance class requires a brief outage for your DB Instance."

Answer 2

RE: Outage Time: we have a SQL Server 2012 RDS Instance (1TB non IOPS drive), and going from an db.m1.xlarge to db.m3.xlarge (more CPU, less $$) incurred just over 4 minutes of downtime.

NOTE: We did the upgrade from the AWS console GUI and selected "Apply Immediately", but it was 10 minutes before the outage actually began. The RDS status indicated "Modifying" immediately after we initiated the update, and it stayed this way through the wait time and the outage time.

Hope this helps!

Greg

Answer 3

I just did an upgrade from a medium RDS instance to a large when we were hit with unexpected traffic (good, right? :) ). Since we have a multi-AZ instance, we were down for 2-3 minutes. In Amazon's documentation, they say that the downtime will be brief if you have a multi-AZ instance.

Answer 4

For anybody interested, we just modified an RDS instance (MySQL, 15 GB HD, rest of standard parameters) changing it from micro to small. The downtime period was 5 minutes.

Answer 5

RE: Outage Time: we have just upgraded postgresql 9.3 by immediately requesting following changes:

• upgrading postgresql 9.3.3 to 9.3.6
• instance resize from m3.large to m3.2xlarge
• changing storage type to provisioned IOPS
• extending storage from 200G to 500G (most expensive operation in terms of time)

It took us almost 5 hours to complete this whole operation. Database contains around 100G of data at moment of upgrade. You can monitor progress of your upgrade under Events section in RDS console. During upgrade RDS takes couple of backup snapshots, progress of those can be monitored under Snapsnots section.

Answer 6

We just did an upgrade from db.m3.large to db.m3.xlarge with 200GB of non-IOPS data running SQL Server 2012. The downtime was roughly 5 minutes.

Answer 7

Upgrading MySQL RDS from db.t2.small to db.t2.medium for 25G of data took 6 minutes.

Answer 8

On multi-az, there will be a failover, but otherwise it will be smooth. Heres the timeline data from my most recent db instance type downgrade from r3.4xlarge to r3.2xlarge on a Multi-Az configured Postgres 9.3 with 3TB of disk( actual data is only ~800G)

time (utc-8) event Mar 11 10:28 AM Finished applying modification to DB instance class Mar 11 10:09 AM Multi-AZ instance failover completed Mar 11 10:08 AM DB instance restarted Mar 11 10:08 AM Multi-AZ instance failover started

Answer 9

We had a Alter statement for a big table( around 53 million records) , and it was not able to complete the operation.

The existing size usage was 48GB. We decided to increase the allocated Storage in AWS - RDS Instance The whole Operation took 2 hours to complete MYSQL db.r3.8xlarge from 100G to 200G

The Alter statement took around 40 min but it worked.

Answer 10

Yes, they're upgradable. Upgraded RDS instance from SQL Server 2008 to SQL Server 2012 for instance size of about 36 GB, class db-m1-small, storage 200 GB and with no IOPS or Multi AZ. There was no downtime, this process barely took 10 minutes.