RDS Read Replicas vs Multi-AZ Deployments
Read Replicas
Asynchronous replication - Highly Scalable.
Can be within a region or within an AZ or cross-region.
Provide enhanced performance and durability for RDS database instances.
They make it easy to elastically scale out beyond the capacity constraints of a single DB instance for read-heavy database workloads.
Read replicas can also be promoted when needed to become standalone database instances.
Multi-AZ
Synchronous replication - Highly durable.
Always spans 2 AZs within a region.
Provide enhanced availability and durability for RDS database instances.
When you provision a Multi-AZ DB Instance, RDS automatically creates a primary DB Instance and synchronously replicates the data to a standby instance in a different Availability Zone.
Each AZ runs on its own physically distinct, independent infrastructure, and is engineered to be highly reliable.
In case of an infrastructure failure, RDS performs an automatic failover to the standby (or to a read replica in the case of Aurora), so that you can resume database operations as soon as the failover is complete.
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