Understand and Optimize AWS Aurora Global Database

AWS Aurora Database supports a global multi-region setup, including a primary and a secondary region. When engineering with Aurora Global, the default settings are great, but understanding all the available configuration options and how those come together saves time and effort. This article explains Global Write Forwarding and its effects in detail, which is a very handy setting that lets applications read and write from applications running on both primary and secondary regions. Note that this article is not about Aurora DSQL, which is a different service that supports active-active setup out of the box. Aurora Defaults Aurora Global Database sets up a writer and a reader in the primary region, plus a reader and a standby writer instance in the secondary region. The standby writer will be promoted to a writer during a region failover, where the secondary region becomes primary.