How do I configure notifications for Amazon RDS or Amazon Redshift maintenance windows?

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I want to set up notifications for Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) and Amazon Redshift maintenance windows to minimize the affect on my resources.

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Set up event notifications for Amazon RDS and Amazon Redshift clusters and instances so that you receive notifications regarding on-going or completed maintenance. You can use Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) to receive these notifications by either email or SMS.

You can see the Amazon RDS DB instances that are scheduled to receive hardware maintenance during your maintenance window. To do so, review the DB instances that are listed in the Affected resources tab. For more information, see the maintenance notification email sent to your account.

When the maintenance is in progress, Single-AZ deployments are unavailable for a few minutes during that maintenance window. Suppose that you use a Multi-AZ deployment and the primary DB instance is in an affected Availability Zone while the maintenance is in progress. The database isn't available until failover is complete, which is usually about 60 seconds. (Note that this failover occurs in your maintenance window). If the primary DB instance isn't in an affected Availability Zone while the maintenance is in progress, then the secondary is replaced. The secondary is replaced during your maintenance window without failover and without affecting availability. To identify the Availability Zone of your primary or secondary DB instance, see describe-db-instances.

Amazon RDS

To configure event notifications for Amazon RDS, complete the following steps:

Create an Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) topic. Then, use your endpoints to subscribe to a topic, such as email accounts or mobile numbers.
Open the Amazon RDS console. From the navigate pane, choose Event subscriptions.
Choose Create event subscription.
On the Create event subscription page, enter the following information:
For Name, enter a name for the subscription.
For Target, select Amazon Resource Name (ARN), and then choose the ARN for the SNS topic.
Under Source, select Instances as the Source type.
Choose Select specific instances, and then select your instance.
Choose Select specific event categories, and then select Maintenance.
Choose Create.

After you create an event subscription, you receive notifications with the following event codes:

RDS-EVENT-0026 for maintenance in progress.
RDS-EVENT-0027 for maintenance that is complete.

Amazon Redshift

To configure event notifications for Amazon Redshift, complete the following steps:

Open the Amazon Redshift console. From the navigation pane, choose Events.
Choose Event Subscriptions, and then choose Create event subscription.
On the Create event subscription page, enter the following information:
In the Subscription details section, under Event subscription name, enter a name for this event.
In the Subscription type section, under Source type, choose Cluster.
For Cluster, choose Select cluster, and then choose your cluster IDs.
For Categories, choose your categories.
For Severity, choose Error or Info, Error.
In the Subscription actions section, create a topic or choose an existing topic.
Choose Create event subscription.