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Amazon DocumentDB

Amazon DocumentDB Global Clusters

What are Global Clusters?

Global Clusters is a feature of Amazon DocumentDB that provides disaster recovery from region-wide outages and enables low-latency global reads. Critical workloads with a global footprint have strict availability requirements and may need to tolerate a region-wide outage with a very low Recovery Time Objective (RTO). Amazon DocumentDB Global Clusters helps you support critical, global workloads by automatically replicating data across multiple AWS regions, with sub-second latencies. Amazon DocumentDB Global Clusters replicates your data to clusters in up to 10 AWS regions with little to no impact on performance, with a typical lag of less than one second. You can create a new Global Cluster or add regions to existing clusters with just a few clicks on the  AWS Management Console , or by using the AWS SDK or CLI. Learn more about setting up Global Clusters in the  Amazon DocumentDB user guide .

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How it works

Amazon DocumentDB Global Clusters uses storage-based fast replication across regions with latencies less than one second, using dedicated infrastructure with no impact to your workload’s performance. In the unlikely event of a regional degradation or outage, one of the secondary regions can be promoted to full read/write capabilities in less than one minute. You can have up to 10 secondary regions with Global Clusters, and each secondary region can have up-to 16 replica instances.

A diagram illustrating AWS global clusters with a primary region and multiple secondary regions, displaying connections between the regions on a world map. The diagram shows database icons labeled as 'P' for Primary region and 'S' for Secondary regions.

Benefits

Disaster recovery from region-wide outages

Region-wide outages are uncommon, but if they do occur, Global Clusters allows you to recover in less than 60 seconds. You can promote your secondary cluster to a standalone cluster and recreate a global database in a different region without any data loss.

Global reads with low latency

You can use Global Clusters to replicate data to other regions so that users can read data from secondary clusters in regions that are closest to them. Global Clusters serve reads locally and with low latency from secondary clusters, while using the primary cluster for writes, helping optimize for use cases with a high read to write ratio.

Scalable secondary clusters

You can scale each secondary cluster independently, as the number and type of instances in the primary and secondary clusters don’t need to be the same. You can create secondary clusters with one replica instance and scale up to 16 instances as needed. Scaling instances in Amazon DocumentDB takes less than 10 minutes, regardless of the data volume.

High-speed replication across clusters

Global Clusters uses fast, storage-based physical replication of data from primary to secondary clusters. The compute instances provisioned don’t participate in replication, which frees them up for serving application requests.