Upgrading relational databases without downtime is a challenge under the best of circumstances and with the limited control hosted solutions give it’s even worse. Often time there’s no way to get a deterministic backup, and promoting read replicas incur downtime. All hope is not lost, in this talk we will discuss a reliable strategy for upgrading IaaS databases with no downtime and a minimum of acrobatics. The technique uses an intermediary read replica to provide a consistent place to start replication on a new database.