Introduction to Read Replicas

Introduction

Only RDS for SQL Server 2019 Enterprise Edition and 2017 Enterprise Edition support read replicas.

In read-intensive scenarios, a single DB instance may be unable to handle the read pressure and service performance may be affected. To expand the DB instance read ability to offload read pressure on the database, you can create one or more read replicas in a region. These read replicas can process a large number of read requests and increase application throughput. You need to separately configure connection addresses of the primary DB instance and each read replica on your applications so that all read requests can be sent to read replicas and write requests to the primary DB instance.

A read replica uses the architecture of a single physical node (without a slave node). Changes to the primary DB instance are also automatically synchronized to all associated read replicas through the native replication function of Microsoft SQL Server. The synchronization is not affected by network latency. Read replicas and the primary DB instance must be in the same region but can be in different AZs.

Functions

Specifications of read replicas can be different from those of the primary DB instance, and can be changed at any time.
You do not need to maintain accounts or databases. Both of them are synchronized from the primary DB instance.
Read replicas support system performance monitoring.
RDS provides up to 20 monitoring metrics, including storage space, IOPS, number of database connections, CPU usage, and network traffic. You can view these metrics to understand the load of DB instances.