Log shipping

You can use log shipping to send transaction log backups from your primary, on-premises SQL Server database to one or more secondary (warm standby) SQL Server databases that are deployed on EC2 instances or Amazon RDS for SQL Server DB instances in the AWS Cloud. To set up log shipping on Amazon RDS for SQL Server, you have to use your own custom scripts.

In this scenario, you configure a warm standby SQL Server database on an EC2 instance or Amazon RDS for SQL Server DB instance, and send transaction log backups asynchronously between your on-premises database and the warm standby server in the AWS Cloud. The transaction log backups are then applied to the warm standby database. When all the logs have been applied, you can perform a manual failover and cut over to the cloud.

This option supports all versions and editions of SQL Server. After you have migrated the database to the AWS Cloud, you can add a secondary replica by using an Always On availability group for high availability and resiliency purposes.

For more information about using this method to achieve high availability, data protection, and disaster recovery for your SQL Server databases on Amazon EC2, see Log shipping in the Amazon EC2 for SQL Server section.