Purpose

Starting April 26 2022, Amazon will start upgrading all Amazon RDS instances using PostgreSQL 9.6 to PostgreSQL 12.  Read more about this in their announcement.

This date was originally January 18 2022 but on 17th January, Amazon announced that they were extending the EOL process until April 26 2022.  (This is an additional 14 weeks on the original date)

Support for PostgreSQL 12 was added in Jira 8.19.  If you are using an earlier version of Jira, and your deployment's database is an Amazon RDS instance using PostgreSQL 9.6, you may end up with an unsupported database after April 26 2022.

Solution

Upgrade to Postgres 9.6-12

Additional steps if you use our QuickStart templates

If your current Jira version supports PostgreSQL 10:

1. Scale your instance down to zero nodes.

2. Prepare for and check that a major version upgrade is supported

3. Follow the steps above to manually upgrade the Postgres RDS instance from 9.6 to 10.
   Important note: don't change the DBEngineVersion parameter in the template, as this will result in a DBGroup error. 
4. Wait for the RDS upgrade to complete.
5. Scale your cluster up to 1 node first, check everything is working with no issues, then you can scale your cluster back up to the ideal number. 

If your current Jira version does not support PostgreSQL, you will need to upgrade Jira to a version that supports PostgreSQL once the RDS upgrade is complete (before scaling your cluster up to 1 node). For full details of how to upgrade, see Upgrading Jira Data Center on AWS. 

Note that the DBEngineVersion parameter in the QuickStart template will continue to be set to version 9.6. If you try to change this parameter you will get a DBGroup error. As long as your application is connected to the new database version, there shouldn't be any problems.