Skip to content

Extended Support Monitoring

AWS charges additional fees when managed services run beyond their standard support period. These extended support charges apply per-vCPU and can significantly increase your bill.

Implementation Effort: High - Estimated time: 8-40 hours. Requires engine or platform version upgrade with downtime planning, compatibility testing, and rollback strategy.

What We Detect

We monitor extended support charges across four services:

  • RDS -- Database engine versions that have reached end of standard support
  • EKS -- Kubernetes versions that have reached end of standard support
  • OpenSearch -- Elasticsearch and OpenSearch versions in extended support
  • ElastiCache -- Redis OSS versions that have reached end of standard support

Why It Matters

Extended support fees can add $0.10-$0.50 per vCPU-hour on top of your normal instance costs. For multi-node clusters, this compounds quickly. Upgrading to a supported version eliminates these charges while also improving security and feature access.

Recommendations

  1. Plan version upgrades with appropriate testing and rollback strategies
  2. Prioritize resources with the highest extended support charges
  3. Use blue/green deployments where possible to minimize upgrade risk

Keep on chasing 🧡