Amazon EC2 High Availability Database Architecture

Question:

I’m currently spec’ing out a solution running on EC2. Setting up web servers, utilizing S3, Cloud Front, Cloud Watch, etc have been straightforward enough. Using Elastic Load Balancers for HA cross Availability Zone for our web servers has also been straightforward.

I would really like to have cross Region Availability in addition to cross Availability Zone. This would help alleviate the potential for an outage due to region outage.

I haven’t been able to find much information about folks running two way replication cross region for their dbs. Is this possible? What is the performance like?

Answer:

Before investing much time and effort, you may want to take into consideration that Amazon is promising a High-Availability offering on top of the Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS).

New Features for Amazon RDS Coming Soon

High Availability Offering — For
developers and business who want
additional resilience beyond the
automated backups provided by Amazon
RDS at no additional charge. With the
high availability offer, developers
and business can easily and
cost-effectively provision
synchronously replicated DB Instances
in multiple availability zones,
to protect against failure within a
single location.

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