Amazon Neptune 1.2.x and 1.1.1.0 End of Life: December 4, 2026

By Scott Bissett  ·  Published: November 6, 2026  ·  Reference guide  ·  Dates read from AWS's Neptune engine releases page on the day of publication.

Amazon Neptune engine versions 1.2.0.0 to 1.2.1.2 and 1.1.1.0 reach end of life on December 4, 2026. The date is in the version table on AWS's Engine releases for Amazon Neptune page. After it, AWS stops letting you create clusters or instances on those versions and upgrades the remaining ones automatically during a maintenance window. The version AWS lists as the upgrade target, 1.3.0.0, is itself only dated to March 6, 2027, so the choice of target decides whether you upgrade once or twice in the next year.

AWS's dates for the engine versions that end first

The “Upgrade to” column is AWS's own. Every Neptune engine version and its dates is on the Amazon Neptune page.

What AWS says happens at end of life

AWS's engine releases page sets out three things:

• No new capacity on the old version. “When an engine version reaches its end of life, you will no longer be able to create new clusters or instances using that version, nor will autoscaling be able to create instances using that version.” A cluster that relies on autoscaling to add read replicas loses that on the old version.
• A forced upgrade. “An engine version that actually reaches its end of life will automatically be upgraded during a maintenance window.”
• A notice first. AWS sends an automated email to the address on the AWS account, and posts the same message to the AWS Health Dashboard, at least 3 months before an engine version's end of life. AWS says that message names the version you would be upgraded to automatically, the impact on your DB clusters and the actions it recommends. That message, not this guide, is the authority on which version AWS will pick for your clusters.

Going from 1.2 to 1.3 or later, or from 1.1.1.0 to 1.2, is a major version upgrade, with the parameter group and compatibility changes described below, whether you run it or AWS does. Upgrading yourself first lets you pick the target, test it and choose the time.

Which version to move to

AWS's release notes for 1.3.0.0, the 1.4 releases and 1.5.0.0 each say: “You can upgrade to this release from engine release 1.2.0.0 or above.” So a 1.2 cluster can go straight to any of them. Their end dates differ by most of a year:

Moving to 1.3.0.0, the target in AWS's table, buys the time to March 6, 2027 and then needs another upgrade. 1.4.8.0 runs to October 27, 2027. 1.5.0.0 had no end-of-life date in AWS's table when this guide was written; it also carries the largest change for Gremlin users (below).

What changes on the way up

• Parameter groups. 1.2 engines use the parameter group family neptune1.2. AWS's 1.3.0.0 release notes say that when upgrading from an engine version earlier than 1.3.0.0, “you must re-create all of your existing custom parameter groups and custom cluster parameter groups using parameter group family neptune1.3”, and that you should use 1.4.0.0 cluster parameter groups for 1.4.0.0 and above. AWS's parameter group page lists neptune1.4 for engine versions 1.4.x.
• It is a major version upgrade. AWS says major engine releases must always be installed manually, and that the --allow-major-version-upgrade parameter is required to perform one. Name the target engine version explicitly; AWS warns that without it “your engine may be upgraded to a different version.” For the least downtime, AWS points to its Neptune Blue-Green deployment solution.
• Gremlin in 1.5.0.0. AWS's 1.5.0.0 release notes describe a move to Apache TinkerPop 3.8.x with new minimum Gremlin client versions (Java 11+, Python 3.10+, Go 1.25+, .NET 6.0+) and step behaviour changes that “may not surface as errors, but rather change query results.” Test queries for changed results, not only for failures.
• 1.1.1.0 takes two steps. AWS's 1.2.0.0 release notes say you can only upgrade to 1.2.0.0 “from the latest patch release of engine release 1.1.1.0”, and the 1.3, 1.4 and 1.5 engines accept upgrades only from 1.2.0.0 or above. A 1.1.1.0 cluster goes to 1.2 first and then on, and both hops have to finish before December 4, 2026 to stay ahead of AWS's own upgrade.

What to do

1. List every Neptune cluster and its engine version, in every region and account. Read the AWS Health Dashboard for the end-of-life notice, which names the version AWS would upgrade each cluster to.
2. Pick a target by its own end date from the table above, so the next forced upgrade is not three months away.
3. Re-create custom parameter groups in the target's family, take a manual snapshot (AWS “strongly recommend[s]” one before every upgrade), and test the application on a copy.
4. Upgrade before December 4, 2026, at a time you choose, rather than in the maintenance window AWS picks.

Running Neptune on a schedule you cannot meet? Tell us about your environment and we will reply with the options we know of, or say plainly that there are none.

Frequently Asked Questions

Related

• Amazon Neptune — every engine version and its dates
• Amazon DocumentDB — another AWS-managed database with engine end dates
• EOL Checker — check a list of versions at once