Amazon RDS for SQL Server Now Supports Always On Availability Groups for SQL Server 2017

Amazon RDS for SQL Server now supports Always On Availability Groups for SQL Server 2017 which enables you to improve availability and durability of your SQL Server deployments by automatically replicating databases between two AWS Availability Zones (AZ). This feature is now available for SQL Server 2017 latest minor version (14.00.3049.1.v1) for the Enterprise Edition database engine. Previously, in November 2018, we announced support for this feature for SQL Server 2016 Enterprise Edition.

The SQL Server Multi-AZ deployment option offers you an easier and more effective way to design and operate applications and databases, making them more available, fault tolerant, and scalable than traditional single datacenter infrastructures or multi-datacenter infrastructures.

When you create your SQL Server database instance to run using Multi-AZ on SQL Server 2016 or 2017 latest minor versions for the Enterprise Edition database engine, Amazon RDS will automatically provision a primary database in one Availability Zone and maintain a synchronous "standby" replica in a different Availability Zone using Always On Availability Groups.

If you are modifying an existing Multi-AZ instance that uses Microsoft Mirroring, you will need to first convert to the Single-AZ availability type then re-apply the Multi-AZ flag. In the event of planned database maintenance or unplanned service disruption, Amazon RDS will automatically fail over the SQL Server database to the up-to-date standby so that database operations can resume quickly.

With an Always On Availability Group setup, you can easily connect to the listener endpoint in order to have faster failover times. To learn more visit the Amazon RDS User Guide.

Please visit Amazon RDS for SQL Server Pricing for complete regional availability information.