Amazon Redshift announces Deferred Maintenance and Advance Event Notifications

You can now defer maintenance of your Amazon Redshift cluster to keep your data warehouse running without interruption during critical business periods. You will now also receive advance notifications from Amazon Redshift prior to any upcoming maintenance on your cluster.

Amazon Redshift reserves a 30-minute weekly window to apply upgrades and do any other scheduled maintenance activities, such as replacing nodes to avoid hardware failures. You can select a day and time for the maintenance window using the Modify Cluster setting on the AWS management console or using the Modify Cluster API. If there are no maintenance tasks to perform during the scheduled maintenance window, your cluster continues to operate normally until the next scheduled maintenance window.

From large enterprises to fast growing start-ups, many businesses run mission critical workloads on Amazon Redshift. During high business activity period, you might want to defer the scheduled maintenance to a less busy time. Using 'the Deferred Maintenance' feature you can now postpone scheduled maintenance. Amazon Redshift waits for the following maintenance window to apply software updates. The deferred maintenance period is overridden if a mandatory hardware replacement is scheduled on your cluster. If hardware replacement is required, you will get an event notification through the AWS management console and the SNS subscription.

Amazon Redshift now sends advance notifications, under the Pending category, if a software upgrade or hardware replacement is scheduled during the upcoming maintenance window. The advance notification is sent when the maintenance event is scheduled by the system. You can subscribe to Pending events using Amazon SNS.

To learn more about the maintenance window and how to defer maintenance, refer to Maintenance Windows in the Amazon Redshift Cluster Management Guide. To learn how to subscribe to Pending event notifications, see Event Notifications in the Amazon Redshift Cluster Management Guide.

Deferred Maintenance and Advance Notifications are now available in all AWS commercial regions. Refer to the AWS Region Table for Amazon Redshift availability.