---
title: Troubleshooting Major Version Upgrade: AWS Aurora
description: If you need to perform a major version upgrade to your AWS Aurora instance(s), you might run into errors, here's a possible solution
date: 2021-10-12
tags: Troubleshooting, AWS, Aurora RDS
source: https://brianchildress.co/blog/major-version-upgrade-aws-aurora
---

# Troubleshooting Major Version Upgrade: AWS Aurora

I recently needed to perform a major version upgrade to several AWS Aurora instances, however ran into issues when trying to create a new instance by restoring from a snapshot.

I won't go into how to perform the upgrade, that's available in the AWS docs here: [Upgrading AWS Aurora DB Instance](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/AuroraUserGuide/USER_UpgradeDBInstance.PostgreSQL.html). I will share a very helpful piece of information I found in this recent [Stack Overflow thread](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/69113494/can-not-upgrade-aurora-rds-postgres-version-from-12-to-13), thank you to the poster 🙏.

Apparently there is a known issue with some RDS instance types that won't allow you to upgrade smoothly. For us, we were trying to upgrade an existing `db.r5.large` instance from Postgres 12 to Postgres 13. The upgrade didn't work until we changed our new target instance to an `db.r6g.large` instead. By simply changing the instance type we were able to perform the upgrade from within the AWS console.