AWS: “Postgres 9.6 is old. On January 22 we will forcibly update your instances to 12. We hope you noticed this alert. We certainly didn’t email you about this. You’d better get off your ass and test/fix your clients for any potential issues.”
We did our upgrades few months back (9.6 -> 13) and luckily in our case it wasn't big of a hassle. Just finding out correct upgrade path with Postgis took some investigation, but overall the upgrade documentation was good.
https://forums.aws.amazon.com/ann.jspa?annID=8499
So obviously I was embellishing the language, but the sentiment remains the same. I found this because I checked the RDS admin panel, which I rarely do. I didn't get an email. It was very alarming to discover and makes me anxious about what other forced upgrades I'll miss.
I appreciate the point of this, but I think forcing upgrades is absolutely the wrong way to do it. Scream at me all you want, but don't force my stack to mutate and potentially break services.
What do you want AWS to do here? Keep running software that won't get security updates? That seems a bit wild to me.
Communication could have been better, but there is no universe in which a managed database provider should be expected to continue to maintain instances with discontinued versions of software.
Why were you still running 9.6 anyway?
PostgreSQL is open source, so they could keep patching the old version with security fixes.
Or... they could keep using just the community-supplied free-of-charge version and pocket all the money from not maintaining security patches themselves.
I'm not saying RDS couldn't be better, but I wouldn't expect them to maintain unsupported versions of 3rd party software.
https://www.postgresql.org/about/policies/sponsorship/
But AWS should not have to take responsibility for providing indefinite updates to every version of every managed open source project it operates. The only way I could see this working would be if AWS charged the holdouts the cost of keeping them supported.
However, performing RDS Postgres upgrades is relatively quick and painless process. If a company doesn't have the capacity to do that every five years, then it shouldn't be running its own infrastructure.
That actually sounds like a great idea. They could charge more for use of older versions, so that people could calculate their tradeoffs, and migrate when they decide themselves.