AWS RDS MySQL 5.6 (Aurora 1.x) Requirement - what happens to 5.6 snapshots after retirement of the server/engine?

Question

We recently migrated our RDS databases to 5.7+ to prepare for AWS' retirement of MySQL 5.6 support.
We have snapshots of previous databases from the 5.6 days - will those be accessible down the line or should we plan to upgrade them?

Per the [announcement here](https://repost.aws/questions/QUImshxjRKSRq-t-AQppM6SA/announcement-deprecated-amazon-relational-database-service-rds-for-my-sql-5-6-end-of-life-date-is-august-3-2021):

> You can continue to restore your MySQL 5.6 snapshots as well as create read replicas with version 5.6 until the August 3, 2021 end of support date.

This makes it sound like we should prepare to restore, upgrade, and re-snapshot existing snapshots to be able to maintain access to them. Is this something Amazon is planning to automate or should I make a ticket for our own teams to do it ourselves?

Answer

Hi,

For RDS MySQL 5.6: After August 3, 2021 00:00:01 AM UTC, any restoration of Amazon RDS for MySQL 5.6 database snapshots will result in an automatic upgrade of the restored database to a still supported version at the time. Refer to the [announcement](https://repost.aws/questions/QUImshxjRKSRq-t-AQppM6SA/announcement-deprecated-amazon-relational-database-service-rds-for-my-sql-5-6-end-of-life-date-is-august-3-2021) for this.

For Aurora MySQL 1: February 28, 2023 – After this time, we plan to automatically upgrade Aurora MySQL version 1 clusters to the default version of Aurora MySQL version 2 within a scheduled maintenance window. Restoring Aurora MySQL version 1 DB snapshots results in an automatic upgrade of the restored cluster to the default version of Aurora MySQL version 2 at that time. Refer to this [blog post](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/database/upgrade-amazon-aurora-mysql-compatible-edition-version-1-with-mysql-5-6-compatibility/) for this.

Basically you can retain the snapshots and use them to restore after the deprecation date, but they will be restored in Amazon RDS for MySQL 5.7 or Aurora MySQL version 2, depending on the snapshot.

AWS RDS MySQL 5.6 (Aurora 1.x) Requirement - what happens to 5.6 snapshots after retirement of the server/engine?

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