Working with maintenance windows

All of the AWS-managed database services offer a maintenance window that can be defined by the customer. A maintenance window is a weekly timeslot when AWS is authorized to carry out patching work or other tasks that may cause an outage of your database. These outages will always be communicated in advance, but they cannot always be avoided. There is another window that will be created for a daily backup on RDS. AWS will assign a random maintenance window when you create a managed database. As a result, it is critical that the maintenance and backup windows are set for the quietest time for your application to avoid an unexpected outage or performance issue due to a backup running during peak hours.

You can modify the windows during and after the creation of a managed database.

You can also control the backup times and patterns using AWS Backup, which we will learn next.