Why Upgrade?
If you are using provisioned instances for your Aurora RDS MySQL, MariaDB or PostgreSQL databases, upgrading to equivalent Graviton2 instances gives you an immediate saving of 10% and a 20% improvement in performance. This represents an almost 35% price/performance improvement. (This does not apply to Aurora Serverless, since you have no control over the Instances.)
Simple Steps to Upgrade
Upgrading an Aurora database instance to Graviton2 requires a simple instance type modification if you are on a supported database version.
- Open the AWS RDS console
- In the navigation pane, choose Databases, and then select the DB cluster that you want to modify.
- Choose Modify. The Modify DB Instance page appears.
- Select the Graviton2 instance type that matches your needs.(they have a “g” suffix). Example above: upgrade a db.m5.large instance to a db.m6g.large
- Choose Continue and check the summary of modifications.
- Note: When you change the database instance in a cluster, the instance you have changed goes offline during the change. Your cluster remains available. Your cluster endpoint does not change.
- To apply the changes immediately, select Apply immediately. Otherwise the default is to wait for the next Maintenance Window.
Your applications will continue to work as normal and you will not have to port any application code.
If you want a simple automated solution, try CloudFix that can apply such fixes for you.
Interested in a more technical deep dive? Read the Whitepaper here.
Upgrade Notes:
- Manage your reserved instances: If you have reserved instances, make sure that you can reallocate reservations on the old instance to some other workloads. For even greater savings, you might want to procure reserved instances for your new Graviton2 instance type.
- You do not have to change your application code to use the Graviton2 instances.
- Your cluster endpoint does not change when you change the class of a database instance.
- A change of instance type means a relocation of the instance to another hardware host, which means that the buffer cache isn’t maintained. Therefore, when the database on the modified instance restarts, the buffer cache is cold and initial queries might take longer.
Supported Versions
You can migrate if your Aurora MySQL version is 2.09.2 and higher, or your PostgreSQL version is 11.9 and higher, 12.4 and higher, or 13.3.
