Amazon RDS for MariaDB: MariaDB 10.5 end of standard support

31 Aug 2026 is the RDS end of standard support date that AWS lists for MariaDB 10.5. The AWS page does not state what happens to DB instances still on MariaDB 10.5 after that date.

• RDS for MariaDB major versions remain available at least until community end of life for the corresponding community version.
• A date with only a month and a year is approximate and is replaced by an exact date once known.
• If AWS extends support for a version beyond the stated date, it plans to update its version table with the later date.
• Deprecation policy: see the Amazon RDS FAQs.

1. Find the valid upgrade targets for the DB instance in the AWS Management Console or with the aws rds describe-db-engine-versions AWS CLI command.
2. If the DB instance uses read replicas, upgrade all of the read replicas before the source instance.
3. Start the major version upgrade by modifying the DB instance, after following Major version upgrades for RDS for MariaDB. Major version upgrades are performed manually.
4. Plan for downtime: database engine upgrades require downtime, and its duration varies with the size of the DB instance.
5. Downtime for the upgrade can be reduced with a blue/green deployment: Using Amazon RDS Blue/Green Deployments for database updates.
6. The engine cannot be reverted after the upgrade completes. To return to the previous version, restore the first DB snapshot taken during the upgrade to a new DB instance. Amazon RDS only takes these snapshots if the backup retention period of the DB instance is greater than 0.