Best practices for Aurora MySQL high availability
You can apply the following best practices to improve the availability of your Aurora MySQL clusters.
Topics
Using Amazon Aurora for Disaster Recovery with your MySQL databases
You can use Amazon Aurora with your MySQL DB instance to create an offsite backup for disaster recovery. To use Aurora for disaster recovery of your MySQL DB instance, create an Amazon Aurora DB cluster and make it a read replica of your MySQL DB instance. This applies to an RDS for MySQL DB instance, or a MySQL database running external to Amazon RDS.
Important
When you set up replication between a MySQL DB instance and an Amazon Aurora MySQL DB cluster, you should monitor the replication to ensure that it remains healthy and repair it if necessary.
For instructions on how to create an Amazon Aurora MySQL DB cluster and make it a read replica of your MySQL DB instance, follow the procedure in Using Amazon Aurora to scale reads for your MySQL database.
For more information on disaster recovery models, see How to choose the best disaster recovery option for your Amazon Aurora MySQL cluster
Migrating from MySQL to Amazon Aurora MySQL with reduced downtime
When importing data from a MySQL database that supports a live application to an Amazon Aurora MySQL DB cluster, you might want to reduce the time that service is interrupted while you migrate. To do so, you can use the procedure documented in Importing data to a MySQL or MariaDB DB instance with reduced downtime in the Amazon Relational Database Service User Guide. This procedure can especially help if you are working with a very large database. You can use the procedure to reduce the cost of the import by minimizing the amount of data that is passed across the network to AWS.
The procedure lists steps to transfer a copy of your database data to an Amazon EC2 instance and import the data into a new RDS for MySQL DB instance. Because Amazon Aurora is compatible with MySQL, you can instead use an Amazon Aurora DB cluster for the target Amazon RDS MySQL DB instance.
Avoiding slow performance, automatic restart, and failover for Aurora MySQL DB instances
If you're running a heavy workload or workloads that spike beyond the allocated resources of your DB instance, you can exhaust the resources on which you're running your application and Aurora database. To get metrics on your database instance such as CPU utilization, memory usage, and number of database connections used, you can refer to the metrics provided by Amazon CloudWatch, Performance Insights, and Enhanced Monitoring. For more information on monitoring your DB instance, see Monitoring metrics in an Amazon Aurora cluster.
If your workload exhausts the resources you're using, your DB instance might slow down, restart, or even fail over to another DB instance. To avoid this, monitor your resource utilization, examine the workload running on your DB instance, and make optimizations where necessary. If optimizations don't improve the instance metrics and mitigate the resource exhaustion, consider scaling up your DB instance before you reach its limits. For more information on available DB instance classes and their specifications, see Amazon Aurora DB instance classes.
