Creating an RDS database with automatic failover

In this recipe, we're going to create a MySQL Relational Database Service (RDS) database instance configured in multi-AZ (Availability Zone) mode to facilitate automatic failover. This is a best practice and should be done for all production databases. The standby database in a separate AZ is not the same thing as a read replica—its sole purpose is to enable High Availability (HA).

Getting ready

The default VPC will work fine for this example. Once you are comfortable with creating databases, you may want to consider a VPC containing private subnets that you can use to segment your database away from the internet and other resources (in the style of a three-tier...