Amazon Web Services has announced Read Replicas, a new feature for Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for scaling MySQL database deployments to meet the performance demands of high-traffic web applications. Read Replicas let users create one or more copies of a given MySQL Database Instance, which allows an application to serve read traffic from multiple database replicas. Customers can create or delete replicas in minutes using the intuitive point-and-click interface of the AWS Management Console.

Amazon RDS users can add the scalability of Read Replicas to the availability and durability benefits of Multi-AZ deployments. Once a Read Replica is created from a specified source Database Instance, any subsequent updates made to the source will automatically be replicated to the Read Replica. Read Replicas can be elastically added to any Amazon RDS database deployment to keep query response times fast, even as request volumes scale. With Multi-AZ, each update made to an Amazon RDS Database Instance is automatically replicated to a standby in another Availability Zone. Availability Zones are distinct, physically-separate locations with independent infrastructure. In the event of a DB Instance or Availability Zone disruption, Amazon RDS will automatically failover to the up-to-date standby so that database operations can resume quickly without administration intervention.

In a related announcement, Amazon RDS has lowered prices for High Memory Database Instances. The prices for Quadruple Extra Large Database Instances (68 GB of memory) and Double Extra Large Database Instances (34GB of memory) have been lowered by more than 15 percent.