DynamoDB Global Tables: Multi-Region Strong Consistency for Highly Resilient Applications
Building highly resilient and globally available applications requires a data layer that can handle failures and provide low latency across different geographical regions. Achieving this often involves complex data replication strategies. However, managed services can significantly simplify this challenge.
A key technology for this is a fully managed, multi-region, multi-active database feature designed to provide fast local read and write performance for global applications. This feature leverages automatic, active-active replication between specified AWS Regions.
A primary benefit of this approach is enhanced resilience. By replicating data across multiple regions, applications can remain operational even in the event of an entire region failure. This provides a robust disaster recovery solution without the need for manual data synchronization or failover procedures.
Furthermore, it offers strong consistency across all replica tables within the global setup. This is a crucial advantage, ensuring that reads return the most recent committed write across all regions, simplifying application logic compared to eventually consistent models.
The setup is relatively straightforward: you create replica tables in different regions from a single source table. Updates made to items in any replica table are automatically and asynchronously replicated to all other replicas in the global table set. This allows applications in different regions to write to their local replica, benefiting from lower latency, while the data is propagated globally. This active-active capability enables seamless traffic shifting between regions for failover or load distribution.
In essence, this managed database feature provides a powerful and simplified solution for building highly available and highly resilient applications that require multi-region strong consistency, abstracting away the complexities of cross-region data management and replication.
Source: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/build-the-highest-resilience-apps-with-multi-region-strong-consistency-in-amazon-dynamodb-global-tables/
