Announcement: Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL now supports cross-region read replicas

Posted on 2016-06-17 by Amazon Web Services

You can now quickly create cross-region read replicas for your unencrypted Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL database instances with just a few clicks on the AWS Management Console. You can use this feature to reduce read latency for your customers in different geographic locations, to create a backup of your primary database for disaster recovery purposes, or quickly migrate your database to a different AWS Region.

Disaster Recovery: You can create cross-region read replicas of your primary database instance to have a disaster recovery solution. If your primary region faces a disruption, you can promote the replica to a master and keep your business operational.

Scaling: You can use cross-region read replicas to support read queries from your workloads across various geographic locations. This will reduce latency by serving your customers from a database that is close to them.

Cross-region Migration: If you would like to migrate your database instance quickly to another AWS region, you may do so by using cross-region replication. Simply create a replica in your target region, and once it is ready, promote it to master and point your application to it.

This feature is available for all RDS PostgreSQL databases that are version 9.5.2 or 9.4.7 and higher. To create a cross-region replica of a database instance operating on an older version, you can upgrade to a supported version by performing a database version upgrade. To learn more about cross-region replication for RDS PostgreSQL, please refer to the RDS documentation.