Upgrade to Aurora RDS 1.7 to avoid possible outage

During a recent event, we ran into an issue where a sudden surge of traffic caused new MySQL connections to hang. We debugged this problem and found MySQL connect calls blocking for 20+ seconds. Actual query latency once connection was established was normal (milliseconds). These blocked connections caused further problems up the request chain, which to put nicely we would have preferred to avoid. If you’re running an Aurora RDS instance, consider upgrading to 1.7 ASAP to avoid this potential problem.

A colleague found our specific problem listed as a fixed defect in 1.7:

Defects Fixed:

• Fixed an issue with connection establishment taking a long time when there is a surge in the number of connections to the instance.

Link to AWS Aurora 1.7 announcement here: AWS Aurora 1.7 Announcement with Release Notes