Designing cross-Region DR solutions for Amazon RDS standard editions

When it comes to disaster recovery capabilities, standard editions offer the following cross-Region options:

• Automated snapshots using AWS Backup

• Amazon RDS point-in-time recovery (PITR) snapshot replication

• Native transaction log backup replication

• AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS)

It's essential to understand the recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) requirements along with the budget while designing cross-Region DR solutions. You can minimize RPO by configuring a combination of synchronous and asynchronous DR strategies and options. However, this will increase infrastructure cost.

It's hard to achieve near zero RPO with Amazon RDS standard editions because there are no synchronous replication options. However, AWS can provide competitive RPO by using various cost-effective options.

The following table summarizes the DR solutions and their availability in each license model, with enterprise editions included to give you a complete view:

• Amazon RDS for Microsoft SQL Server Standard Edition (SE)

• Amazon RDS for Oracle Standard Edition 2 (SE2)

• Enterprise Edition (EE) of Amazon RDS for Oracle and Amazon RDS for SQL Server

Solution	DR site scope	RDS for SQL Server		RDS for Oracle
		SE	EE	SE2	EE
Multi-AZ deployment	In-Region	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Mounted or read-only replica promotion	In-Region, cross-Region	No	Yes	No	Yes
Automated snapshots using AWS Backup	In-Region, cross-Region	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Amazon RDS PITR snapshot replication	In-Region, cross-Region	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Native transaction log backup replication	In-Region, cross-Region	Yes	Yes	Not Applicable	Not Applicable
AWS DMS	In-Region, cross-Region	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes

The following sections discuss the options available for cross-Region disaster recovery for standard editions.