RDS is not "geo-redundant". It is an multi-AZ DB, which is very different to mul...

axelfontaine · on July 13, 2015

"Availability Zones (AZs) are within a DC" => not really

See this Re:Invent 2014 talk about AWS Innovation At Scale http://mvdirona.com/jrh/talksandpapers/JamesHamiltonReInvent... => Slide 9: "Each AZ is 1 or more DC, No data center is in two AZs, Some AZs have as many as 6 DCs"

mugsie · on July 13, 2015

Sorry - you are right, with the scale of Amazon they are within a region. But that is still not Geo-Redundant. If a hurricane takes out Virgina, you are still going to loose your data.

tgeek · on July 13, 2015

AZ's are typically 5-15miles apart. Needs to be a pretty large hurricane that far in land to take out all the various datacenters.

Also, just to clarify, you can do multi-region RDS read-replicas for MySQL: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/UserGuide/USER_...

lamontcg · on July 13, 2015

The Virginia DCs are in different flood plains and on different power grids. A hurricane remnant did hit the one year (2005 probably) and a tornado took out power to one of them.