How do I upgrade my Amazon Elastic Beanstalk MySQL RDS instance to 5.6?

Question

AWS provides guidelines as to how to upgrade a MySQL 5.5 instance to MySQL 5.6 using read replicas. However, its final step is to point your application to the new database, but EBS provides no mechanism through the web console to point your application to a different database. What is the recommended path to upgrading EBS-based RDS instances?

Answer 1

I generally advise users to provision the Database outside of Beanstalk, this issue being one of them.

Also

For a production environment, you may want to launch a database instance outside of your environment and configure your application to connect to it outside of the functionality provided by Elastic Beanstalk.

AWS RDS does support the 5.5 to 5.6 upgrade.

MySQL 5.5 to MySQL 5.6

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/UserGuide/USER_UpgradeDBInstance.MySQL.html

But in your current setup.

1. Create a snapshot of the RDS database.
2. Provision an RDS Database outside of Beanstalk based on that snapshot
3. Provision a new Elastic Beanstalk environment and set these environment properties.

In the Environment Properties section, define the variables that your application reads to construct a connection string. For compatibility with environments that have an integrated RDS DB instance, use the following:

RDS_HOSTNAME – The hostname of the DB instance.

Amazon RDS console label – Endpoint is the hostname.

RDS_PORT – The port on which the DB instance accepts connections. The default value varies between DB engines.

. Amazon RDS console label – Port

RDS_DB_NAME – The database name, ebdb.

Amazon RDS console label – DB Name

RDS_USERNAME – The user name that you configured for your database.

Amazon RDS console label – Username

RDS_PASSWORD – The password that you configured for your database.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/latest/dg/AWSHowTo.RDS.html