Rebooting a DB instance restarts the database engine service. A reboot also applies to the DB instance any modifications to the associated DB parameter group that were pending. Rebooting a DB instance results in a momentary outage of the instance, during which the DB instance status is set to rebooting. If the RDS instance is configured for MultiAZ, it is possible that the reboot will be conducted through a failover. An Amazon RDS event is created when the reboot is completed.

If your DB instance is deployed in multiple Availability Zones, you can force a failover from one AZ to the other during the reboot. You might force a failover to test the availability of your DB instance deployment or to restore operations to the original AZ after a failover occurs.

The time required to reboot is a function of the specific database engine's crash recovery process. To improve the reboot time, we recommend that you reduce database activities as much as possible during the reboot process to reduce rollback activity for in-transit transactions.