AWS runs cloud computing services for Amazon. According to the company, the feature – dubbed Read Replicas – is designed to allow customers to create one or more copies of a given MySQL Database instance. The technology enables an application to serve read traffic from multiple database replicas.

High Demand Read Replicas

“Since the launch of Amazon RDS last year, customers have been using the service to quickly deploy fully featured MySQL databases, while offloading common database administrative tasks to the service,” said Raju Gulabani, vice president of Database Services at Amazon Web Services, in a statement. “Our customers have asked for the same friction-free experience for scaling their read traffic and today we’re excited to offer Read Replicas to meet this customer request.”

Customers can create or delete replicas in minutes using AWS Management Console interface. According to the company, once a Read Replica is created from a specified source database instance, any subsequent updates made to the source will automatically be replicated to the Read Replica.

With Multi-AZ, each update made to an Amazon RDS database instance is automatically replicated to a standby in another Availability Zone, all of which are distinct, physically separate locations with independent infrastructure. If there is a DB Instance or Availability Zone disruption, Amazon RDS will automatically fail over to the up-to-date standby so that database operations can resume quickly without administration intervention, the company said.

“Together with the Multi-AZ feature, Amazon RDS now offers advantages in scalability, multi-data centre availability, elasticity and ease of administration at a fraction of the cost of operating MySQL servers on-premise,” Gulabani said.