Posted On: Oct 10, 2023
Today, AWS announces the general availability of pgactive: Active-active Replication Extension for PostgreSQL, available for Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) for PostgreSQL. pgactive lets you use asynchronous active-active replication for streaming data between database instances to provide additional resiliency and flexibility in moving data between database instances, including writers located in different AWS Regions, for the purposes of maintaining availability for operations like switching write traffic to a different instance.
Customers use asynchronous active-active replication to allow applications designed for eventual consistency to write to two or more database instances to help maximize availability and reduce write latency. To support active-active replication, pgactive includes features such as node synchronization, automatic conflict detection and resolution, replication lag metrics, and can continuously copy data in up to 16 different writer instances. pgactive provides several automatic conflict resolution strategies in case two writers simultaneously modify the same database record, such as last update wins, first update wins, or customizable rules.
pgactive is available on database instances in Amazon RDS running PostgreSQL 15.4-R2 and higher in all applicable AWS Regions, including the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. Please see the list of supported extensions in the Amazon RDS User Guide for specific versions.
You can get started by launching a new Amazon RDS DB instance directly from the Amazon RDS Management Console. You can learn more about pgactive in the AWS Database Blog and in the Amazon RDS User Guide.