Amazon improves reliability of its cloud database

Amazon Web Services has added a new high-availability feature called Multi-Availability Zone (Multi-AZ) to its cloud-based Relational Database Service (RDS), the company said on Tuesday.

The addition of Multi-AZ provides better database availability by automatically configuring a standby copy of the database, which is stored in a different physical location from the original in Amazon’s cloud. Updates to the primary database are automatically replicated to the copy, according to Amazon. A drawback is that users may experience more latency compared to a database that doesn’t use Multi-AZ, Amazon said in an FAQ.

The copy takes over during an outage caused by, for example, a network or a storage failure or during planned maintenance. From start to finish, the failover between the two databases typically completes within five minutes, according to Amazon.

Adding Multi-AZ doubles the hourly costs users pay for each database instance to between US$0.22 and $6.82, depending on the location and the performance metrics of the instance. Users also have to pay for primary and backup storage, the number of requests, and data transfer in and out of Amazon’s cloud.

Amazon RDS is based on MySQL 5.1 and is still in beta.

Amazon is also working on a second feature that will replicate data to improve scalability by using multiple database instances at the same time. So-called Read Replicas will make it easier to take advantage of MySQL’s native, asynchronous replication to dynamically add instances to handle large amounts of incoming read traffic, according to Amazon, which didn’t provide when the feature would become available.

Would you recommend this article?

Share

Thanks for taking the time to let us know what you think of this article!
We'd love to hear your opinion about this or any other story you read in our publication.


Jim Love, Chief Content Officer, IT World Canada

Featured Download

Featured Articles

Cybersecurity in 2024: Priorities and challenges for Canadian organizations 

By Derek Manky As predictions for 2024 point to the continued expansion...

Survey shows generative AI is a top priority for Canadian corporate leaders.

Leaders are devoting significant budget to generative AI for 2024 Canadian corporate...

Related Tech News

Tech Jobs

Our experienced team of journalists and bloggers bring you engaging in-depth interviews, videos and content targeted to IT professionals and line-of-business executives.

Tech Companies Hiring Right Now