Two Questions Regarding AWS' RDS Multi AZ

Question

1. I understand that when upgrading to a Multi-AZ rds from a Single-AZ, there occurs a \"breef i/o freeze\". What exactly does that mean?

2. When an upgrade i

Answer 1

Answers to your questions are written down :

1. When you choose to move from Single AZ to Multi AZ, brief I/O freeze happens. It means that for some duration database won't be accessible. No read,write operations will be performed on the database. Mostly, the duration for this is around 3-4 minutes.

2. Yeah, production database will be affected when you resize the compute(from small to large). The best idea to perform resize operation is during scheduled maintenance window. If select Apply Immediately option, for sometime the database won't be accessible(time to switch control to backup server).

Regards, Sanket Dangi

Answer 2

the downtime when converting from single-AZ to multi-AZ is essentially the time it takes for a new instance to launch and become fully functional as sanket said, it may take a few mins.

scaling up a multi-AZ deployment first scales up the slave instance, then performs a failover. the downtime is the time it takes to do the actual failover - usually closer to a minute.

scaling out a multi-AZ deployment is done by adding additional read-replicas (sourced off of the standby) which incurs no interruption. keep in mind that adding read-replicas creates an eventually consistent system which may or may not be desirable.

it's also worth nothing that you should use the same instance types across all multi-AZ instances, otherwise the imbalance may incur replica lag.

as you're probably realizing, it's best to start with a multi-AZ configuration from the beginning. it makes scaling up and scaling out a lot easier and with less downtime.