AWS now charges for running old versions on five managed services, each with its own formula: per vCPU for RDS and Aurora, six times the control plane rate for EKS, an 80–160% premium for ElastiCache, and up to the full instance price for old OpenSearch domains. The rates, the dates, and how to find every charge on your bill.
Managed services used to force upgrades. Now most of them let you stay on an old version and charge for it. That is a reasonable trade for a few months of breathing room and an expensive one as a habit, because the charges are designed to rise.
Book a free 30-minute call. You'll leave knowing what we'd do first and roughly what it costs, whether or not you hire us.
From each service's published Extended Support pricing and dates, checked October 2026.
When Extended Support ends, RDS upgrades the engine to the next supported major version itself, on its schedule rather than yours. PostgreSQL 11 is the next to reach that point, on March 31, 2027.
Lambda is the exception: it has no paid extended support. Deprecated runtimes keep running, but Lambda first blocks creating new functions on them and then blocks updates, so a deprecated runtime becomes a function you cannot change.
An RDS MySQL 8.0 db.r6g.2xlarge (8 vCPUs) with a Multi-AZ standby: 16 vCPUs × $0.10 × 730 hours, about $1,170 a month on top of the instance price, rising to about $2,340 in year three.
Ten EKS clusters a version behind: $0.50 × 10 × 730, about $3,650 a month in extra control plane fees.
An old Elasticsearch logging domain on the oldest versions: double its compute bill from November 7, 2026.
In Cost Explorer, filter by usage type containing "ExtendedSupport" across all services, grouped by account.
In the RDS, EKS, ElastiCache and OpenSearch consoles, sort resources by engine or platform version.
Put the upgrade work in this quarter's plan, ordered by monthly charge. The most expensive line is rarely the hardest upgrade.
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As of October 25, 2026. Provided as is, for general information, and accurate to the best of our knowledge on the date shown. Not legal, compliance, tax, financial or other professional advice. Prices, limits and vendor services change; check current vendor documentation before relying on anything here. Terms of use.