Amazon RDS enhances Multi-AZ replication with ENA Express

Amazon RDS has introduced ENA Express for its Multi-AZ instances, enhancing the replication traffic between Availability Zones. ENA Express utilizes AWS’s Scalable Reliable Datagram (SRD) protocol, which is designed to optimize network performance. This protocol enables up to 25 Gbps single-flow bandwidth for cross-AZ replication traffic by employing advanced congestion control and multi-pathing capabilities, effectively reducing latency variability in Multi-AZ deployments.

In Multi-AZ configurations, Amazon RDS instances replicate data synchronously to a standby instance located in a different Availability Zone. This setup ensures high availability and provides automatic failover capabilities. The use of AWS SRD with ENA Express improves the replication process by dynamically distributing network traffic across multiple paths and adjusting to congestion in real-time.

The adoption of ENA Express in Amazon RDS Multi-AZ deployments results in increased write throughput and reduced write latencies, particularly benefiting write-intensive database workloads. This enhancement is available at no extra cost for Amazon RDS for MariaDB, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Db2, and Oracle.

ENA Express support is offered in various regions, including Africa (Cape Town), Asia Pacific (Hong Kong, Hyderabad, Jakarta, Malaysia, Melbourne, Mumbai, New Zealand, Osaka, Seoul, Singapore, Sydney, Taipei, Thailand, Tokyo), Canada (Central and West, Calgary), Europe (Frankfurt, Ireland, London, Milan, Paris, Spain, Stockholm, Zurich), Israel (Tel Aviv), Mexico (Central), US East (N. Virginia, Ohio), US West (N. California, Oregon), and AWS GovCloud (US).

To activate ENA Express on your existing Amazon RDS instances, you can perform a start-stop or scale compute action. For detailed information on supported instance types, please refer to the user guide.