[Announcement] Extending end-of-life process for Amazon RDS for MySQL 5.6

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) is extending the end-of-life process for MySQL major version 5.6. Amazon RDS customers can continue to create new MySQL 5.6 instances until February 1, 2022, and Amazon RDS will begin automatic upgrades of MySQL 5.6 instances starting March 1, 2022. This does not apply to Aurora Clusters.

We previously communicated in the MySQL 5.6 End-of-Life forum post [1] that we would begin automatic upgrades starting August 3, 2021, and upgrade remaining instances on September 1, 2021. We have decided to extend the end-of-life process for all customers.

We strongly encourage customers to upgrade their MySQL 5.6 instances to MySQL 5.7 or greater as soon as possible, ahead of this end-of-life schedule. The MySQL community discontinued support for MySQL 5.6 on February 5, 2021 [2], and the community will no longer produce bug fixes or security patches for this version. MySQL 5.7 contains major innovations including native support for JSON data type, GIS with native InnoDB spatial indexes and Performance Schema for new and improved performance metrics with the new SYS Schema [3]. MySQL 8.0 contains Window Functions, Common Table Expressions and also offers 2x higher performance compared to MySQL 5.7 [4]. Both versions contain numerous fixes to various software bugs in earlier versions of the database.

The following is a summary of the new extended timeline for the end-of-life schedule for MySQL 5.6:

• Currently, Customers can initiate upgrades of Amazon RDS for MySQL 5.6 instances to MySQL 5.7 and 8.0 at any time. Customers can also continue to restore MySQL 5.6 snapshots, and create read replicas with version 5.6.

• Starting February 1, 2022, Customers will no longer be able to create new RDS instances using MySQL 5.6 from the AWS Console or CLI.

• Starting March 1, 2022, Amazon RDS will begin automatically upgrading MySQL 5.6 instances to version 5.7. If a customer restores MySQL 5.6 database snapshots, Amazon RDS will automatically upgrade the restored database to MySQL 5.7.

To avoid any unplanned unavailability when upgrading your database, we recommend that you first test the upgrade process using a database snapshot. To learn more about upgrading MySQL major versions in Amazon RDS, review the Upgrading Database Versions topic in the RDS User Guide [5]. Another common technique for reducing downtime from version upgrades is described in the AWS Best Practices blog post [6].

Should you have any questions or concerns, the AWS Support Team is available on the community forums and via Premium Support [7].

References
[1] https://forums.aws.amazon.com/ann.jspa?annID=8498
[2] https://www.mysql.com/support/eol-notice.html
[3] https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2016/02/amazon-rds-now-supports-mysql-5-7/
[4] https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2018/10/amazon-rds-now-supports-mysql-8/
[5] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/UserGuide/USER_UpgradeDBInstance.Upgrading.html#USER_UpgradeDBInstance.Upgrading.Manual
[6] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/database/best-practices-for-using-a-mysql-read-replica-to-upgrade-an-amazon-rds-for-mysql-database/
[7] https://aws.amazon.com/support