Configuring active-active clusters for RDS for MySQL - Amazon Relational Database Service
Use cases

Configuring active-active clusters for RDS for MySQL

An active-active cluster in Amazon RDS is a database configuration where multiple nodes actively handle read and write operations, distributing the workload across instances to improve availability and scalability. Each node in the cluster is synchronized to maintain data consistency, enabling high availability and faster failover in case of node failure

You can set up an active-active cluster for RDS for MySQL by using the MySQL Group Replication plugin. The Group Replication plugin is supported for RDS for MySQL DB instances running the following versions:

  • All MySQL 8.4 versions

  • MySQL 8.0.35 and higher minor versions

For information about MySQL Group Replication, see Group Replication in the MySQL documentation. The MySQL documentation contains detailed information about this feature, while this topic describes how to configure and manage the plugin on your RDS for MySQL DB instances.

Note

For the sake of brevity, all mentions of "active-active" cluster in this topic refer to active-active clusters using the MySQL Group Replication plugin.

Use cases for active-active clusters

The following cases are good candidates for using active-active clusters:

  • Applications that need all of the DB instances in the cluster to support write operations. The Group Replication plugin keeps the data consistent on each DB instance in the active-active cluster. For more information about how this works, see Group Replication in the MySQL documentation.

  • Applications that require continuous availability of the database. With an active-active cluster, the data is retained on the all of the DB instances in the cluster. If one DB instance fails, the application can reroute traffic to another DB instance in the cluster.

  • Applications that might need to split read and write operations among different DB instances in the cluster for load balancing purposes. With an active-active cluster, your applications can send read traffic to specific DB instances and write traffic to others. You can also switch which DB instances to send reads or writes to at any time.

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