[brentjanderson]

OP here - we would have used the same approach for the minor upgrades. This isn’t a case of “we procrastinated ourselves into a corner” and more a matter of “if it isn’t broke, don’t fix it” recognizing we would need to make the jump eventually.

[NomDePlum]

Just for your information, minor upgrades on Aurora Postgres does now claim increased resilience across minor upgrades, there are some caveats despite the Zero Downtime naming: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/AuroraUserGuide...

I've relied on this as the minor upgrade method since it was available and it has worked as advertised, with no perceivable issues. This may be traffic and operation dependent obviously but worth having a look at.

Worth saying we do the minor upgrades incrementally, intra-day and a few weeks to a month after they are available, as a matter of routine, with a well documented process. Overhead is minimal to practically zero.