Upgrade and Maintenance

IONOS Cloud updates and patches your database cluster to achieve high standards of functionality and security. This includes minor patches for MariaDB and patches for the underlying operating system. Generally, these updates are unnoticeable and do not interrupt your operation. However, occasionally, IONOS restarts your MariaDB instance to allow the changes to take effect.

Prerequisites

• Prepare for a downtime during the version upgrade.

• Ensure the database cluster has enough available storage. While the upgrade is space-efficient (because it does not copy the data directory), some temporary data is written to the disk.

Note: Updates to a new minor version are always backward compatible. Such updates occur during the maintenance window with no additional actions from the user.

Currently, MariaDB only supports minor upgrades. IONOS replaces the mariadb executable binaries with those from a newer version, followed by the execution of the mariadb-upgrade command.

The process replicates data from the old version to the new version and the database switches to the new version. For more information about the upgrade process, refer to the MariaDB Documentation.

All changes that may cause service interruption (like upgrades) are executed within the maintenance window, which is a weekly four-hour window. During the maintenance window, you may experience uncontrolled disconnections and an inability to connect to the database cluster. Such disconnections are destructive for any ongoing transactions and we recommend you reconnect. For more information about how to configure maintenance windows for MariaDB, see Set Up a MariaDB Cluster.