The long-awaited feature from Amazon Web Services, Amazon Aurora Multi-Master is now generally available (GA).

What is Amazon Aurora?

Amazon Aurora is a MySQL and PostgreSQL-compatible relational database built for the cloud, that combines the performance and availability of traditional enterprise databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open source databases.

Why Amazon Aurora?

Amazon Aurora is up to five times faster than standard MySQL databases and three times faster than standard PostgreSQL databases. It provides the security, availability, and reliability of commercial databases at 1/10th the cost. Amazon Aurora is fully managed by Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), which automates time-consuming administration tasks like hardware provisioning, database setup, patching, and backups.

Amazon Aurora Features

Amazon Aurora features a distributed, fault-tolerant, self-healing storage system that auto-scales up to 64TB per database instance. It delivers high performance and availability with up to 15 low-latency read replicas, point-in-time recovery, continuous backup to Amazon S3, and replication across three Availability Zones (AZs).

Visit the Amazon RDS Management Console to create your first Aurora database instance and start migrating your MySQL and PostgreSQL databases.

The Need for Multi-Master Feature

It has always a bottleneck for MySQL databases to scale horizontally, Read replica feature has been available since a couple of years, however, these replicas won't solve performance issues related to a lot of writes transactions, and solution architects have always to spin a large server to handle the writes.

Besides with Multi-Master feature you can build a true database active-active design, having only one writer at the beginning was always a bottleneck, even with Multi-AZ RDS you will still need time to promote the remote server to become the Master instance.

Amazon Aurora Multi-Master

AWS recently announced at re:Invent 2017 the launch of a new feature: multi-master capability to Amazon Aurora, first within a single region but multi-region by the end of 2018.

Andy Jassy, CEO of AWS, announcing Aurora Multi-Master at re:Invent 2017.

Multi-Master clusters improve Aurora’s already high availability. If one of your master instances fail, the other instances in the cluster will take over immediately, maintaining read and write availability through instance failures or even complete AZ failures, with zero application downtime.

Amazon Aurora Multi-Master is now Public!

AWS expected to have Aurora multi-master available by Dec 2018 however, it took more than expected. Today Amazon has announced the preview period has ended and now Aurora Multi-Master is now available to the public.

So is there any Additional cost to launch Aurora Multi-Master?

The Answer is No, There is no additional cost to run Aurora Multi-Master. You just pay for the instances used and the associated storage and IOPS costs for those instances. You can visit the Aurora pricing page to learn more.

Let's Get Started

You can access Aurora Multi-Master using the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), or AWS Software Development Kit (SDK). For more information about Aurora Multi-Master, please read the documentation.

Besides, we recommend the following AWS blog to give you a deeper look at the Multi-Master structure

Laravel Multi-Master Database:

Laravel is already shipped with the availability to spin Multiple Masters and Multiple Readers, so this is a great opportunity for Laravel developers to get benefits of this feature to obtain better availability and performance to their Laravel applications to get more idea on setting multiple writers and readers for Laravel check Laravel documentation

Conclusion:

We're so excited to have this feature available to the public, ensure to have this setup when you build a high availability architecture for your laravel applications or any MySQL DB tier app.