How to have AWS RDS synchronous read replication?

Question

For AWS RDS there are 2 way to create a "clone" of your DB :

1/ Read replica : Create a read replica, data is asynchronous, meaning there's a little delay

2/ Multi-AZ standby : Create a standby DB, data is synchronous, meaning it's exactly same all the time; but this is for fail-over and cannot be used unless main DB down.

So the "synchronous" ability is there already, but I don't find any option to have a synchronous read only replica.

For my case, I want to have read replica to reduce read load on main DB, but data is very sensitive so cannot afford to read old data at all, any suggestion for my case here with AWS RDS service ? like making the "standby" being readable.

Answer 1

If you're using Postgres or MySQL, you can deploy to Aurora rather than standard RDS. It uses a shared data storage layer, so gives you synchronous read replicas, in addition to improved data durability and automatic failover.

Answer 2

There is a new option in RDS that allows having two readable standbys with synchronous replication: https://aws.amazon.com/rds/features/multi-az/#Amazon_RDS_Multi-AZ_with_two_readable_standbys. It's a relatively new offering that still needs testing if there is really no lag when you read from replicas.