Launch a Read Replica

Objective

Launch a Read Replica RDS Instance.

Prerequisites

• AWS Account with RDS support.  You must Sign Up for Amazon RDS before you can launch RDS instances.
• 'actor' user role privileges
• An 'available' source RDS instance

Overview

Read Replicas are a type of RDS instance that's used for taking read-requests off of the source "master" RDS instance.  Read Replicas are ideal for read-heavy database applications.  Updates to the MySQL database on the source DB Instance will be replicated using MySQL’s native, asynchronous replication.  Note: Replication lag can vary significantly.

Steps

Navigate to Clouds > AWS Region > RDS Instances.

Select a source DB instance for which you want to create a Read Replica. 

Note: You can only create a Read Replica instance if you have a source DB instance that will serve as the Master-DB. 

Click the Launch Read Replica button.  This button will only be visible if the source RDS instance is available since a Read Replica will serve as a copy of the source "master" RDS instance for

Fill out the following fields appropriately.

To launch a Read Replica RDS Instance, provide the following information:

• Name - Enter the name of the Read Replica instance that you're going to launch. Note: By default, a name will be automatically generated where the name of the source ("master") RDS instance will be used as a prefix. If you plan to launch more than one Read Replica for the source instance (max=5), you might want to add a number in the name for differentiation purposes.
• Instance Class - Select the instance type that you want to use for launching the new Read Replica RDS instance.
• Endpoint Port - Enter which port will be used by MySQL. By default, if you leave this field blank, port 3306 will be used.
• Availability Zone - Select the availability zone where the instance will be launched. If the 'any' option is selected, Amazon will randomly pick an availability zone for you.
• Auto minor version upgrade - If checked, Amazon will automatically upgrade the instance's MySQL version. For example, if the instance is using MySQL v5.1.50 and Amazon later supports v5.1.51 for RDS instances, your instance's MySQL engine will automatically be upgraded during one of the maintenance windows.
• IOPS - Enter the IOPS for your Read Replica. Note the value of your IOPS depends on the instance in use. Leave blank if you are not using IOPS.

A Read Replica instance will inherit the remainder of its configuration settings from its source DB instance (e.g. RDS Security Groups, RDS Parameter Groups, etc.).  To change any of these settings you will first need to launch the instance, wait for it to become 'available' and editable, edit its configurations, and then reboot the instance.

Tip:  Use the (?) for additional help on specific fields when available.

Click the Launch action button when ready.

Note:  Currently, there is no way to save a new RDS Instance's configuration settings without launching it.

Once its status becomes 'available' the RDS Instance will be accessible.

See also

• RDS Instances
• Modify an RDS Instance