Connect to an Amazon DocumentDB Global Clusters

How you connect to a global cluster depends on whether you need to write to the cluster or read from the cluster:

• For read-only requests or queries, you connect to the reader endpoint for the cluster in your AWS Region.

• To run data manipulation language (DML) or data definition language (DDL) statements, you connect to the cluster endpoint for the primary cluster. This endpoint might be in a different AWS Region than your application.

When you view a global cluster in the console, you can see all the general-purpose endpoints associated with all of its clusters.

How you connect to a global cluster depends on whether you need to write to the database or read from the database. For DDL, DML and read operations that you would like to serve from the primary region, you should connect to your primary cluster. We recommend that you connect to your primary cluster using the cluster endpoint in replica set mode, with a read preference of secondaryPreferred=true. This will route write traffic to your primary cluster’s writer instance and read traffic to your primary cluster’s replica instance.

For cross region, read only traffic, you should connect to one your secondary clusters. We recommend that your connect to your secondary cluster using the cluster endpoint in replica set mode. Since all instances are read-only replica instances, you do not need to specify a read preference. To minimize latency, choose whichever reader endpoint is in your region or the region closest to you.