Today, Vantage announces the General Availability of Extended Support Reporting and Recommendations for Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), allowing Vantage customers to manage the support lifecycle of their RDS databases more effectively. This enhancement provides visibility into the support status of RDS MySQL and PostgreSQL, highlighting database instances incurring Extended Support fees and those approaching end-of-life milestones. Customers can now proactively plan upgrades, optimize costs, and maintain compliance with AWS support policies.

AWS started charging Extended Support fees for RDS in 2023 to allow their customers to continue running a database version for up to three years past the RDS end of standard support date, which is typically a few months after the Community End of Life date for PostgreSQL and MySQL. This support comes at a premium cost to incentivize customers to move off legacy versions. AWS publishes support calendars for Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL and Amazon RDS for MySQL, but this data is not made available in the AWS console for reporting, so organizations must resort to manual reporting and calculations of upcoming End of Support dates.

Now, with the launch of AWS Extended Support Reporting and Recommendations for RDS, Vantage automatically surfaces recommendations for RDS instances currently incurring Extended Support fees, as well as those set to enter Extended Support within the next three months with projected cost estimates. Vantage also automatically annotates RDS instances with metadata in Active Resource Reports, indicating their current support type (Standard or Extended) and the support calendar with end dates of each support phase. Customers can use this information to filter and create views of databases based on their support status or End of Support dates, facilitating timely upgrades and cost avoidance. Vantage will guide engineers on which version they need to upgrade to in order to avoid additional charges, as well as provide direct linking to the AWS console to perform the upgrade.

These new reporting capabilities and recommendations are available today within Active Resource Reports for all Vantage customers with an AWS connection. To get started, navigate to the Active Resources and Recommendations pages in the console. For more information, see the Resource Reports and Cost Recommendations documentation.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. What is being launched today?

Today, Vantage is launching Extended Support Reporting and Recommendations for RDS. Vantage customers will now receive recommendations for their RDS instances that are currently incurring Extended Support, and are about to enter Extended Support in the next 90 days, on the Cost Recommendations page. There will also be additional metadata available within Resource Reports related to RDS Extended Support for custom reporting.

2. Who is the customer?

Any Vantage user who has connected AWS as a provider and uses RDS.

3. How much does this feature cost?

There is no additional cost to see these recommendations; however, if you are on a free trial, the specifics of the recommendations will be obscured.

4. What is Amazon RDS Extended Support?

Amazon RDS Extended Support allows customers to run PostgreSQL or MySQL versions for an additional three years past their respective Community End of Life date. During Extended Support, database instances continue to receive critical security patches. However, AWS charges an increased fee based on the region you run your database in, as well as how long the database has been in Extended Support. To learn more, see the Amazon RDS Extended Support Documentation.

5. What information is available to me within Resource Reports?

When viewing RDS Active Resource Reports, you will now have additional metadata fields for Support Status (values will be “standard_support”, “in_extended_support”, or “nearing_extended_support”) and End of Standard Support Date. With this information, you can curate reports for teams based on their lifecycle status and upcoming End of Support dates.

6. What recommendations are surfaced in Cost Recommendations?

On the Cost Recommendations page, you will receive two recommendations related to RDS Extended Support:

• Total cost currently being incurred by RDS instances that are in Extended Support.
• Projected cost of RDS Instances that are within three months of their End of Standard Support date.

7. How are projected Extended Support costs calculated?

For each RDS MySQL and PostgreSQL instance monitored in Vantage, a lookup will be performed to find the End of Standard Support date. For any instance within three months, Vantage will then perform a lookup on the number of vCPUs the instance uses, and the hourly, per-vCPU rate for extended support in the region deployed. Vantage then uses this rate and assumes 730 hours of runtime in the next 30 days to estimate the monthly savings. Vantage will exclude any instances that have auto-upgrade turned on for MySQL or PostgreSQL, as these will be automatically upgraded prior to the end of Standard Support date.

8. How does Vantage determine the new version number I should upgrade to?

Vantage will determine what the next minor version number that does not have an Extended Support date within the next three months. However, it is recommended to upgrade to the highest allowable version based on your application dependencies.

9. Can I ignore a specific recommendation?

If you want to hide a recommendation, click the Archive icon. The recommendation will be added to your archived recommendation list.

10. Will I be notified when recommendations are surfaced?

We do not currently send notifications when new recommendations are surfaced.

11. Do the RDS Extended Support recommendations include Amazon Aurora?

Vantage provides recommendations for Amazon Aurora in Provisioned Capacity mode, but does not support recommendations for Aurora Serverless.

12. Does Vantage provide this metadata and recommendations for other services that incur Extended Support, such as ElastiCache and OpenSearch?

We plan to launch Extended Support metadata and recommendations for Amazon ElastiCache and OpenSearch in the near future.