Ensuring high data availability is one of the most crucial aspects that every organization around the world tries to achieve. With round-the-clock access to your critical business data, you can always ensure that your business operations run seamlessly, and there is a steady boost & flow of revenue. Most enterprises thus invest in maintaining a robust data recovery mechanism, that can provide them with 24/7 access and data recovery support during the time of an expected failure or disaster.
Recovering enterprise data, however, is no small feat & can take a lot of time and effort, and this is where setting up Amazon Aurora Replication can save your day! With Amazon Aurora Replication in place, you can replicate your data in a matter of minutes and ensure high data availability at all times! The present article aims at providing you with a step-by-step guide along with in-depth knowledge to help you set up replication in Amazon Aurora using Aurora Replicas with ease!
Table of Contents
Introduction to Amazon Aurora
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Amazon Aurora is a relational database engine that houses intuitive functionalities such as high data availability and robust performance support similar to that of an enterprise database. It allows users to set up complex tasks such as database replication and standardization in a matter of minutes, seamlessly and cost-effectively. It’s highly scalable nature, lets users manage their growing data needs with ease, allowing them to cluster data up to a volume of 128 TB’s.
It further houses seamless integration and compatibility with popular databases such as PostgreSQL, MySQL, etc. With its high-performance database engine in place, it allows users to leverage its robust & customised database engines to make use of the highly distributed nature of PostgreSQL & MySQL databases.
For further information on Amazon Aurora, you can check the official website here.
Understanding Aurora Replicas
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One of the most popular and effective ways of setting up Amazon Aurora Replication is by making use of Aurora Replicas, that act as independent data endpoints for your Amazon Aurora database cluster. They allow users to distribute their data across more than 15 such Amazon Aurora-based replicas that are spread across numerous available zones of AWS regions, thereby allowing them to boost data availability and scale their the database operations with ease.
Aurora Clusters make use of a single logical value to represent the volume of the data that a cluster store’s for both the primary and replica instance and hence, lets users query data from all such Aurora Replicas with a minimal time lag of fewer than 100 milliseconds. Aurora Replicas further ensure high data availability even during the time of a primary node failure, by quickly promoting an Aurora Replica to the position of a primary node, thereby acting as failover targets.
Hevo Data, a No-code Data Pipeline can help you replicate data from Amazon Aurora (among 100+ sources) swiftly to a database/data warehouse of your choice. Hevo is fully-managed and completely automates the process of monitoring and replicating the changes on the secondary database rather than making the user write the code repeatedly. Its fault-tolerant architecture ensures that the data is handled in a secure, consistent manner with zero data loss. Hevo provides you with a truly efficient and fully-automated solution to replicate and manage data in real-time and always have analysis-ready data in your desired destination. It allows you to focus on key business needs and perform insightful analysis using BI tools.
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Have a look at the amazing features of Hevo:
- Secure: Hevo has a fault-tolerant architecture that ensures that the data is handled in a secure, consistent manner with zero data loss.
- Minimal Learning: Hevo, with its simple and interactive UI, is extremely simple for new customers to work on and perform operations.
- Live Monitoring: Hevo allows you to monitor the data flow so you can check where your data is at a particular point in time.
- Data Transformation: It provides a simple interface to perfect, modify, and enrich the data you want to export.
- Schema Management: Hevo takes away the tedious task of schema management & automatically detects schema of incoming data and maps it to the destination schema.
- Completely Managed Platform: Hevo is fully managed. You need not invest time and effort to maintain or monitor the infrastructure involved in executing codes.
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Prerequisites
- Working knowledge of Amazon Aurora.
- A general idea of the Amazon Web Service’s environment.
- A general idea of the AWS Management Console.
- An active AWS account.
Steps to Set up Amazon Aurora Replication
Amazon Aurora leverages the single-master mechanism to set up data replication and allows users to select one primary/master node and then replicate their data across a maximum of 15 replicas. The primary node houses the support for carrying out both read & write operations and hence is solely responsible for updating the cluster volume with any new data updates.
Replicas created by Amazon Aurora, however, only support performing the read operations and make use of the same storage volume as the primary database instance. Aurora Replicas, thus allow offloading read-based workloads from the primary database instance with ease.
To effectively set up replication in Amazon Aurora and boost the availability of your database cluster, you can distribute the primary database instance & Aurora Replicas across numerous availability zones. You can use the AWS Management Console, the RDS API, or the AWS CLI to add Aurora Replicas to a database cluster of your choice
You can set up replication in Amazon Aurora using the following steps:
Step 1: Signing in to AWS Console for Amazon RDS
To start replicating your data from Amazon Aurora, you first need to login to the AWS Management Console, to do this, go to the official website of the AWS Management Console for Amazon RDS and log in with your credentials such as username and password.
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Step 2: Configuring the Amazon RDS Database
Once you’ve logged in, you will now be able to see the AWS Management Console for Amazon RDS on your screen as follows:
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Click on the AWS region option found in the top right corner of your console and select the region in which you want to deploy your database instance. With your desired AWS region now set up, click on the databases option, found in the navigation panel and add the database instance. You now need to select the desired database engine, choosing between Aurora, MySQL, PostgreSQL, etc.
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Once you’ve added a new database instance, you now need to ensure that your primary & cluster instances are operating in the available state. If either one of them is in any other “transient” state such as “creating”, you will not be able to create & deploy a replica.
In case you don’t have a primary instance in place for your Aurora Cluster, you can make use of the AWS CLI to create one using the following create db instance command using the following syntax:
create-db-instance
[--db-name <value>]
--db-instance-identifier <value>
[--allocated-storage <value>]
--db-instance-class <value>
--engine <value>
[--master-username <value>]
[--master-user-password <value>]
[--db-security-groups <value>]
[--vpc-security-group-ids <value>]
[--availability-zone <value>]
[--db-subnet-group-name <value>]
[--preferred-maintenance-window <value>]
[--db-parameter-group-name <value>]
[--backup-retention-period <value>]
For example, if you want to create an instance for MySQL, you can use the following command in AWS CLI:
aws rds create-db-instance --db-instance-identifier sample-instance-us-west-2a ^ --db-cluster-identifier sample-cluster --engine aurora --db-instance-class db.r4.large ^ --availability-zone us-west-2a
This is how you can configure the Amazon RDS database to set up Amazon Aurora Replication.
Step 3: Configuring Actions to Set Up Amazon Aurora Replication using Replicas
With your database cluster now up and running, you now need to configure actions. To do this, select the “Actions” option and then click on the add reader page.
Once you’ve clicked on it, the add reader page will now open up on your screen, where you need to specify the desired actions for your Aurora Replica. You will have to provide specifications for parameters such as availability zone, encryption, replica source, database, etc. You can click here to go to the AWS official documentation and learn more about specifying these parameters.
With your Aurora Replica specification now ready, click on done to create your Aurora Replica successfully.
This is how you can set up replication in Amazon Aurora using Aurora Replicas.
Limitation of using Aurora Replicas to Set Up Amazon Aurora Replication
- Setting up replication in Amazon Aurora using replicas requires you to have a strong technical knowledge of the AWS environment & Aurora.
- Creating Aurora Replicas can slow down applications as it results in higher bandwidth consumption.
Conclusion
This article teaches you how to set up Amazon Aurora Replication with ease and answers all your queries regarding it. It provides a brief introduction of various concepts related to it & helps the users understand them better and use them to perform data replication & recovery in the most efficient way possible. These methods, however, can be challenging especially for a beginner & this is where Hevo saves the day.
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Hevo Data, a No-code Data Pipeline, can help you replicate data in real-time without having to write any code. Hevo being a fully-managed, system, provides a highly secure automated solution to help perform replication in just a few clicks using its interactive UI.
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Why don’t you share your experience of setting up Amazon Aurora Replication in the comments? We would love to hear from you!