Amazon RDS Backup and Maintenance Windows Shortened

When you create an Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) DB Instance you need to specify the desired times for the daily backup window and the weekly maintenance window:

If you have enabled backups for a particular DB Instance (by setting the Backup Retention Period to a non-zero value), Amazon RDS will create a snapshot backup at some point within the Backup Window. Effective immediately, we are reducing the duration of the Backup Window from two hours to thirty minutes.

We use the Maintenance Window to install patches and to take care of other maintenance issues on an as-needed basis. This doesn’t actually happen very often; we performed just two maintenance operations during the last year. Again, effective immediately, we are reducing the duration of the Maintenance Window from four hours to thirty minutes.

If you are running a Multi-AZ deployment of Amazon RDS, backups and maintenance occur on your standby instance, minimizing any impact on the primary instance.

If you have not defined a custom backup or maintenance window and used the default value provided by Amazon RDS for any of your existing DB Instances, note that the default window dates and times will be changed on March 14, 2011. Please refer to this forum post for more information.

— Jeff;