Multi-Master and Aurora Serverless

Learn about Multi-Master, Aurora serverless, and self-healing storage.

Multi-Master

Amazon Aurora Multi-Master is a new feature of the Aurora MySQL-compatible edition. It adds the ability to scale out write performance across multiple Availability Zones, allowing applications to direct read/write workloads to multiple instances in a database cluster and operate with higher availability.

Aurora Multi-Master is designed to achieve high availability and ACID transactions across a cluster of database nodes with configurable read after write consistency.

Architecture

  • An Aurora cluster consists of a set of compute (database) nodes and a shared storage volume.
  • The storage volume consists of six storage nodes placed in three Availability Zones for high availability and durability of user data.
  • Every database node in the cluster is a writer node that can run read and write statements.

Applications can use any writer node for their read/write and DDL needs. A database change made by a writer node is written to six storage nodes in three Availability Zones. This provides data durability and resilience against storage node and Availability Zone failures.

The writer nodes are all functionally equal. A failure of one writer node does not affect the availability of the other writer nodes in the cluster. There is no single point of failure in the cluster.

High availability

Aurora Multi-Master improves upon the high availability of the single-master version of Amazon Aurora because all of the nodes in the cluster are read/write nodes.

With single-master Aurora, a failure of the single writer node requires the promotion of a Read Replica to be the new writer. In the case of Aurora Multi-Master, the failure of a writer node merely requires the application to use the writer to open connections to another writer.

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