Aurora Postgres upgrade from11.17 to 16.2

Question

Since 11 has reached EOL, our company is planing to **Migrate from 11.17 to 16.2**. 
It will be helpful if anyone could suggest us any step by step safer & standard approach to do the Migration.

**TECH INFO:**
- Aurora Postgres 11.17 (standard)
- 1 region(us-east-1) & 2 availability zones (write & reader instance)

I have gone through few option that AWS provides.
* **OP-1:** AWS console regional cluster modify option does provide option to upgrade DB engine.
* **OP-2:** AWS blue / green upgrade.
* **OP-3:** In-place upgrade (any step by step doc will be helpful)

**QA1:** But I'm not sure how will **OP-1** & **OP-2** handle my index, existing data & downtime.

**NOTE:**
- We have PROD environment (so backup is mandatory for us).
- We do have concern about downtime ( 30mins - 1 hour won't hurt us that much).

Any suggestion / guide will be helpful. Thanks

Answer

Hey,

Have a look at this [document](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/database/postgresql-11-upgrade-strategies-for-amazon-aurora-postgresql-and-amazon-rds-for-postgresql/) that provides more information on the different options.

**An  In-place upgrade**

* Can be performed from the Amazon RDS console or AWS CLI
* Requires downtime

**Blue/green deployments**

* Can also be performed from the Amazon RDS console and can minimize risks and downtime
* It may restrict some of the operations that a user can perform until the operation is complete

**Out-of-place upgrade**

* It reduces downtime because the upgrade happens on a copy of the database
* It takes several steps to configure continuous replication with the new database instance until cutover happens

I hope this answers your question.

Aurora Postgres upgrade from11.17 to 16.2

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