I run seven AWS RDS for PostgreSQL instances: three in the US, three in Europe, and one in Australia. Each instance hosts roughly 3,000 mostly small databases. Because the supported PostgreSQL versions move forward quickly, we currently upgrade by exporting every database from the old instance and importing it into a newly created instance running the newer version. This takes significant effort and requires a lot of manual monitoring.
I'm considering Aurora PostgreSQL, particularly blue/green deployments, as a way to make major-version upgrades safer and reduce downtime. A direct in-place upgrade on RDS is not currently practical for us because it takes about seven hours, which is more downtime than we can accept. Has anyone managed major PostgreSQL upgrades at this scale with Aurora, and what approach worked well?
3 Answers
For a normal RDS upgrade, you can take a verified backup and change the engine version on the existing instance. AWS handles the upgrade instead of requiring you to export and restore all 3,000 databases manually. This is the approach several people use successfully for both major and minor version upgrades, but you should still test the process and have a rollback plan.
The custom export/import workflow sounds like it may be adding most of the complexity. Create a backup first, then let the managed service perform the version change. If downtime is the main concern, blue/green deployments may help, provided the application can tolerate a short write pause or the replication and cutover behavior are validated beforehand.
Rather than treating the upgrade as a rare, massive migration, practice it more frequently in a test environment and schedule smaller production upgrades. Regular upgrades make the process more familiar and expose compatibility issues earlier. Regardless of whether you stay on RDS or move to Aurora, test extensions, application behavior, backups, and recovery before changing thousands of databases at once.
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