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Service maintenance, updates and upgrades

Aiven applies some maintenance updates automatically and lets you decide when to apply major version upgrades.

Maintenance window​

The maintenance window is a time window during which a mandatory update happens. The nodes behind Aiven services are switched to a new upgraded version. Once the process is completed, the overall URI DNS name is pointed at the new location. During the maintenance window, some services might have minimal downtime.

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For example, when a mandatory service update for Apache Kafka® is released, the Kafka upgrade procedure is executed.

Aiven service upgrades are performed in rolling forward style, which means that new service nodes are first created alongside with the older nodes one at a time, after which the old nodes are retired.

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Major service upgrades are triggered manually. A manually triggered upgrade starts immediately, regardless of the maintenance window. See Upgrade PostgreSQL to a major version.

MySQL, PostgreSQL and Caching updates​

For MySQL®, PostgreSQL® and Caching, the maintenance process usually lasts around several seconds. The downtime comes from old master stopping itself in a controlled manner and new master executing promotion sequence after this.

Once the promotion is complete the old master node starts forwarding requests to the new master node so the service is accessible before DNS updates are propagated, though clients that end up reconnecting to the old master node will see additional disconnection once the old master is permanently retired.

Apache Kafka and OpenSearch updates​

For Apache Kafka® and OpenSearch®, the service DNS address resolves to all the available service nodes. During an upgrade the DNS address changes to reflect the added and removed nodes. For example, during an Apache Kafka upgrade procedure, a three node plan will have a minimum of three nodes available at all times during the whole upgrade operation.

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  • While the DNS name remains the same, the IP address it points to will change during a maintenance break. See static IP addresses.

  • Starting with Aiven for OpenSearch® versions 1.3.13 and 2.10, OpenSearch Dashboards will remain available during a maintenance update that also consists of version updates to your Aiven for OpenSearch service.

Set the maintenance window​

To set the maintenance window:

  1. From the Aiven Console, open your service.
  2. From the Overview page, scroll to the Maintenance section.
  3. Click Actions > Change maintenance window.
  4. Set the date and time of your choice and click Save changes.

Maintenance updates​

There are mandatory and optional upgrades:

  • Mandatory updates: Security updates, platform updates that affect reliability or stability of the service nodes, and quarterly patch updates are always mandatory.
  • Optional updates: All other updates are initially optional. Advance notice is given for all updates. After optional updates have been available for six months, they become mandatory and are applied on the next week's maintenance window at the earliest. This means you have at least 7 days advance notice with exception of critical security updates. These critical updates are applied in the maintenance window of the current week.

During service upgrades, maintenance updates are automatically applied and do not require any action from you.

To display pending maintenance updates, you can use:

Periodic infrastructure updates​

Maintenance updates are scheduled automatically for services with nodes active for 180 days and more.

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Periodic infrastructure updates are mandatory for all the services except for those with maintenance disabled.