Amazon Aurora Global Database is designed for globally distributed applications, allowing a single Amazon Aurora database to span multiple AWS Regions. It replicates your data with no impact on database performance, enables fast local reads with low latency in each Region, and provides disaster recovery from Region-wide outages.
Critical workloads with a global footprint, such as financial, travel, or gaming applications, have strict availability requirements and may need to tolerate a Region-wide outage. Traditionally this required difficult tradeoffs between performance, availability, cost, and data integrity. Global Database uses storage-based replication with typical latency of less than 1 second, using dedicated infrastructure that leaves your database fully available to serve application workloads. In the unlikely event of a Regional degradation or outage, one of the secondary Regions can be promoted to read and write capabilities in less than 1 minute.
Features
Sub-Second Data Access in Any Region
Aurora Global Database lets you easily scale database reads across the world and place your applications close to your users. Your applications enjoy quick data access regardless of the number and location of secondary Regions, with typical cross-Region replication latencies below 1 second. You can achieve further scalability by creating up to 16 database instances in each Region, which will all stay continuously up to date.
Extending your database to additional Regions has no impact on performance. Cross-Region replication uses dedicated infrastructure in the Aurora storage layer, keeping database resources in the primary and secondary Regions fully available to serve application needs.
Cross-Region Disaster Recovery
If your primary Region suffers a performance degradation or outage, you can promote one of the secondary Regions to take read/write responsibilities. An Aurora cluster can recover in less than 1 minute even in the event of a complete Regional outage. This provides your application with an effective Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 1 second and a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of less than 1 minute, providing a strong foundation for a global business continuity plan.
Pricing
With Amazon Aurora Global Database, you pay for replicated write I/Os between the primary Region and each secondary Region. For full pricing and Regional availability see Amazon Aurora Pricing.
Pricing Example
Suppose you have an Aurora Global Database where the primary Region has two instances, consuming 80 GB of storage and performing 45 million write I/Os and 5 million read I/Os per month. Say the secondary Region has one instance serving 5 million read I/Os per month. Using some example Regions and instance types, your overall Amazon Aurora charges for the month will be:
Primary Region - US East (N. Virginia) | |||
---|---|---|---|
Usage Type | Usage | Rate | Monthly Charge |
DB Instance | 2 x db.r5.large x 30 days x 24 hours = 1,440 db.r5.large instance hours | $0.29 per hour | $417.60 |
Storage | 80 GB | $0.10 per GB-month | $8.00 |
Replicated Write I/Os | None | $0.20 per million replicated write I/Os | |
I/Os | 50 million I/Os | $0.20 per million I/Os | $10.00 |
Data Transfer | 45 million write I/O x 2.75 KB per I/O = 117.9 GB | $0.02 per GB | $2.36 |
Total | $437.96 |
Secondary Region - US West (Oregon) | |||
---|---|---|---|
Usage Type | Usage | Rate | Monthly Charge |
DB Instance | 1 x r5.large x 30 days x 24 hours = 720 r5.large instance hours | $0.29 per hour | $208.80 |
Storage | 80 GB | $0.10 per GB-month | $8.00 |
Replicated Write I/Os | 45 million replicated write I/O | $0.20 per million replicated write I/Os | $9.00 |
I/Os | 50 million I/Os = 5 million read I/Os + 45 million write I/Os | $0.20 per million I/Os | $10.00 |
Data Transfer | None | $0.02 per GB | |
Total | $235.80 |
How to Get Started
Global Database is available for Amazon Aurora with MySQL compatibility and Amazon Aurora with PostgreSQL compatibility. Read the documentation, and get started with just a few clicks in the Amazon RDS Management Console.

Select a features page to learn more about the MySQL- or PostgreSQL-compatible edition.