[Announcement] Amazon RDS for MariaDB is deprecating its engine major version 10.3

Amazon RDS for MariaDB 10.3 will reach end of standard support on October 23, 2023. This follows MariaDB community's plan to deprecate MariaDB major version 10.3 on May 25, 2023 [1]. You will be able to run your Amazon RDS for MariaDB 10.3 databases between May 25, 2023 and October 23, 2023. However, these databases will not receive any security patches during this extended availability period. We strongly recommend you monitor the MariaDB community's security vulnerabilities page for documented CVE patches available in the latest versions [2].

We recommend that you proactively upgrade your databases to major version 10.6 before community deprecation of version 10.3 on May 25, 2023. Amazon RDS for MariaDB 10.6 introduced multiple features to enhance the performance, scalability, reliability and manageability of your workloads, including MyRocks storage engine, IAM integration, one-step multi-major upgrade, delayed replication, improved Oracle PL/SQL compatibility and Atomic DDL [3].

To learn more about upgrading MariaDB major versions in RDS, review the 'Major version upgrades for MariaDB' section in the Amazon RDS User Guide [4].

Starting August 23, 2023 12:01 UTC, you will not be able to create new RDS instances with MariaDB major version 10.3 from either the AWS Console or the CLI. We recommend you to upgrade your databases before October 23, 2023. RDS will upgrade your MariaDB 10.3 databases to MariaDB 10.6 during a scheduled maintenance window between October 23, 2023 12:01 UTC and January 23, 2024 12:01 UTC. On January 23, 2024 12:01 UTC, any MariaDB 10.3 databases that remain will be upgraded to version 10.6 regardless of instances' scheduled maintenance window.

To proactively plan for future Amazon RDS for MariaDB deprecation of major version 10.4 and above, you can refer to the release calendar in the Amazon RDS user guide [5].

If you have any questions or concerns, please reach out to AWS Support [6].

[1] https://mariadb.org/about/#maintenance-policy

[2] https://mariadb.com/kb/en/security/

[3] https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2022/02/amazon-rds-mariadb-supports-mariadb-10-6/

[4] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/UserGuide/USER_UpgradeDBInstance.MariaDB.html

[5]https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/UserGuide/MariaDB.Concepts.VersionMgmt.html#MariaDB.Concepts.VersionMgmt.ReleaseCalendar

[6] https://aws.amazon.com/support