Introduction

Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) is a managed database service that makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. With RDS, you can choose from six popular relational database engines – Amazon Aurora, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle, and Microsoft SQL Server – and select the instance size that best fits your workload.

One of the key features of RDS is the ability to deploy your database in a Multi-AZ (Availability Zone) configuration. In this tutorial, we will walk through the steps to create an RDS database with Multi-AZ deployment.

Prerequisites

Before we get started with creating an RDS database with Multi-AZ deployment, there are a few prerequisites you need to have in place.

Firstly, you need to have an AWS account with the necessary permissions to create RDS instances. You will also need to have an EC2 instance or some other client machine from which you can access the RDS database.

Additionally, you should have some basic knowledge of SQL and familiarity with the AWS Management Console.

Step 1: Create an RDS DB Instance

To create an RDS DB Instance, follow these steps:

1. Open the Amazon RDS console.
2. In the navigation pane, choose “Databases”.
3. Choose “Create database”.
4. Select the engine type, version, and edition you want to use for your database. For the purpose of this tutorial, we will select PostgreSQL as our database engine.
5. Select the “Free tier” template for the DB instance class. If you need more resources, you can select a different instance size that meets your needs.
6. In the “Settings” section, provide a name for your database instance. Make sure to use a name that is descriptive and easy to remember.
7. Specify a username and password to access the database.
8. In the “Database options” section, choose a database name and port number.
9. In the “Backup” section, enable automatic backups and select a backup retention period. This will allow you to restore your database in case of a disaster.
10. In the “Maintenance” section, select a preferred maintenance window. During this window, RDS will perform maintenance activities such as software updates and security patches.
11. In the “Security” section, configure the security group settings for your database. By default, RDS will create a new security group with the necessary rules to allow connections to your database over the specified port.
12. Review your settings and choose “Create database” to launch your RDS DB instance.

Once your RDS DB instance is available, you can connect to it from your client machine using the username and password you specified during setup.

Step 2: Enable Multi-AZ Deployment

To enable Multi-AZ deployment for your RDS DB instance, follow these steps:

1. Open the Amazon RDS console.
2. In the navigation pane, choose “Databases”.
3. Select the RDS DB instance you created in Step 1.
4. Choose “Instance actions”, “Modify”.
5. In the “Additional configuration” section, select “Yes” for “Multi-AZ deployment”.
6. Review your settings and choose “Modify DB instance” to save your changes.

Enabling Multi-AZ deployment will create a standby instance of your RDS DB in a different Availability Zone. The standby instance will be an exact replica of your primary instance and will be kept in sync using synchronous data replication.

Step 3: Test Failover

Testing failover for your RDS DB instance is an important step to ensure that your database can be recovered in case of an outage. To test failover, follow these steps:

1. Open the Amazon RDS console.
2. In the navigation pane, choose “Databases”.
3. Select the RDS DB instance you created in Step 1.
4. Choose “Instance actions”, “Reboot with failover”.
5. Confirm that you want to reboot with failover.

After confirming, RDS will perform a failover to your standby instance in a different Availability Zone. The DNS endpoint for your RDS DB instance will automatically be updated to point to the new instance.

Conclusion

In this tutorial, we walked through the steps to create an RDS database with Multi-AZ deployment. Multi-AZ deployment provides high availability and fault tolerance for your database by creating a standby instance in a different Availability Zone. By following these steps, you can create a scalable and reliable database in the cloud that is always available to your applications.