A company runs a production database on Amazon RDS for MySQL. The company must upgrade the database version for security compliance. Because the database contains critical data, the company wants a quick way to upgrade and test functionality without losing any data. Which solution will meet these requirements with the LEAST operational overhead?

Amazon RDS Blue/Green Deployments provide a safe and simple way to make database changes, including major and minor version upgrades, without data loss and with minimal downtime. It creates a staging environment (green) that is a synchronized replica of the production environment (blue). You can perform the upgrade and testing on the green environment. Once validated, you can switch over to the green environment in minutes, making it the new production. This approach ensures zero data loss and significantly reduces operational overhead compared to manual methods. Creating a manual snapshot and upgrading the existing database would incur downtime during the upgrade and testing phases, and there's no easy rollback. Native backup and restore involves significant downtime and manual effort to restore data. AWS DMS is designed for migrating databases and can be complex for simple version upgrades, adding unnecessary operational overhead for this specific use case.