Amazon RDS Extended Support Explained

AWS is ending standard support for RDS for PostgreSQL 12 and Aurora PostgreSQL 12 today, just one year after standard support ended for RDS for PostgreSQL 11 and Aurora PostgreSQL 11. Additional charges, which can add up to ~$14,400 more a year for just a single-AZ 16 vCPU instance, will apply (see section). In light of that, here’s everything you need to know about RDS Extended Support.

What is RDS Extended Support?

RDS Extended Support is a paid Amazon RDS offering that allows you to continue receiving security updates and critical fixes for database versions that have reached the end of Amazon standard support. When community support ends for a database engine version these updates are no longer provided by the open-source community.

That means Amazon needs to step in and take over providing that support. So, with Extended Support, the actual functionality of the RDS service does not change, and your database will continue running without interruption. What does change is an additional cost.

Extended Support applies for RDS for PostgreSQL, RDS for MySQL, Aurora PostgreSQL, and Aurora MySQL. The end of standard support dates for Aurora PostgreSQL and Aurora MySQL match up with RDS for PostgreSQL and RDS for MySQL, respectively. See the linked Amazon calendars for past and future Extended Support start dates.

RDS Extended Support Costs

For provisioned instances, Extended Support is charged per vCPU per hour. These charges appear as a separate line item in your AWS Cost and Usage Report (CUR) under Region-ExtendedSupport:Yr1-Yr2:PostgreSQL12 and apply all the same for On-Demand and Reserved Instances.

Charges are region-specific but are the same rate for provisioned instances regardless of the database engine. In other words, Aurora PostgreSQL, Aurora MySQL, Aurora PostgreSQL, and Aurora MySQL are all priced the same for provisioned instances. We’ll go over Aurora Serverless V2 Extended Support pricing in a bit.

Another caveat is that pricing depends on the calendar date as well, after two years the hourly vCPU price increases again, and then, after three years RDS automatically updates the version for you—so no more Extended Support costs, but your database will be forcefully updated which can cause application compatibility issues and outages.

For US East (Ohio), the least expensive Extended Support region, charges amount to $0.10 per vCPU-hr for the first two years. Then, two years after standard support ends (March 1, 2027, in the case of RDS for PostgreSQL 12), charges increase even more to $0.20 per vCPU-hr.

To put that into perspective: A db.r6g.4xlarge (16 vCPU) instance will cost ~$14,400 more per year (16 vCPUs x $0.10 per vCPU-hr x 24 hours x 365 days).

And that’s just one instance. The same rate also applies for each standby in a Multi-AZ setup and each read replica.

Here’s a pricing calculator to help you estimate year one and two costs:

RDS Extended Support Pricing Calculator

RDS Extended Support Pricing by Region and Year

For a different view, here is a table of provisioned instance pricing by region and year:

Amazon RDS Extended Support provisioned instance pricing (scroll to see full table)

Charges for Aurora Serverless V2 apply under the same guidelines, except charges are based per Aurora Capacity Unit (ACU) instead of vCPU.

Amazon Aurora Serverless V2 Extended Support pricing (scroll to see full table)

Conclusion

AWS charges for Extended Support when community support for database versions ends. This is to encourage customers to upgrade to newer, fully supported PostgreSQL versions since AWS needs to take on additional maintenance, security updates, and critical fixes once community support ends. However, the cost it is steep. Ending support may take engineering effort (and those associated costs), but it likely won’t amount to what AWS is charging you. Also, support fully ends after three years anyway so just delaying to upgrade is delaying the inevitable. To switch, simply upgrade your version to a supported one and AWS will automatically unenroll you in Extended Support.