Parameter group changes not reflecting on Aurora Serverless DB cluster

Question

I'm trying to update the binlog_format parameter in my Aurora mysql 5.6.10 (Data API enabled) instance to ROW but I'm not able to change it.

I've updated my custom parameter group accordingly but those changes do not reflect on the cluster when I run show variables like 'binlog_format' .

• Right after changing the parameter group, the cluster goes into Modifying state but after that finishes the parameter hasn't been updated.
• I can't seem to find an option to reboot or stop the cluster on the AWS UI.
• Using the CLI, I get this error trying to stop the cluster: An error occurred (InvalidDBClusterStateFault) when calling the StopDBCluster operation: Stop-db-cluster is not supported for these configurations .
• Tried changing the capacity settings but that didn't do anything.

Is there any other way I'm missing?

Answer 1

You'll have to check if the specific property modification is supported by serverless engine or not by running this command:

aws rds describe-db-cluster-parameters --db-cluster-parameter-group-name <param-group-name>

If you read the output from above statement, it says 'provisioned' for SupportedEngineModes:

       {
            "ParameterName": "binlog_format",
            "ParameterValue": "OFF",
            "Description": "Binary logging format for replication",
            "Source": "system",
            "ApplyType": "static",
            "DataType": "string",
            "AllowedValues": "ROW,STATEMENT,MIXED,OFF",
            "IsModifiable": true,
            "ApplyMethod": "pending-reboot",
            "SupportedEngineModes": [
                "provisioned"
            ]
        }

Ideal state is something like this for a modifiable parameter:

       {
            "ParameterName": "character_set_server",
            "Description": "The server's default character set.",
            "Source": "engine-default",
            "ApplyType": "dynamic",
            "DataType": "string",
            "AllowedValues": "big5,dec8,cp850,hp8,koi8r,latin1,latin2,swe7,ascii,ujis,sjis,hebrew,tis620,euckr,koi8u,gb2312,greek,cp1250,gbk,latin5,armscii8,utf8,ucs2,cp866,keybcs2,macce,macroman,cp852,latin7,utf8mb4,cp1251,utf16,cp1256,cp1257,utf32,binary,geostd8,cp932,eucjpms",
            "IsModifiable": true,
            "ApplyMethod": "pending-reboot",
            "SupportedEngineModes": [
                "provisioned",
                "serverless"
            ]
        },

Answer 2

Aurora does support Start and Stop APIs now, so I'm surprised that you were not able to use it.

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2018/09/amazon-aurora-stop-and-start/

Can you try using them through CLI?

On a separate note, if you just want to reboot the engine for the param change to flow in, you just need to use the reboot-db-instance API.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/reference/rds/reboot-db-instance.html