Amazon RDS for SQL Server adds high availability support in additional AWS regions

Starting today, Amazon RDS for SQL Server now supports Multi-AZ deployments in the following AWS regions: Middle East (Bahrain), Asia Pacific (Hong Kong), EU (Stockholm) and China (Beijing).

Amazon RDS for SQL Server Multi-AZ is a high availability option which leverages either SQL Server Database Mirroring (DBM) or Always On Availability Groups (AGs), depending on your configuration. DBM and AGs meet the requirements of enterprise-grade production workloads running on SQL Server. The Multi-AZ deployment option provides enhanced availability, data durability and fault tolerance by automatically replicating database updates between two AWS Availability Zones. Availability Zones are physically separate locations with independent infrastructure engineered to be insulated from failures in other Availability Zones.

When you create or modify your SQL Server database instance to run using Multi-AZ, Amazon RDS will automatically provision a primary database in one Availability Zone and maintain a synchronous "standby" replica in a different Availability Zone. In the event of planned database maintenance or unplanned service disruption, Amazon RDS will automatically fail over the primary SQL Server database to the up-to-date standby so that database operations can resume quickly without any manual intervention.

To get started, please visit the Amazon RDS for SQL Server documentation. For pricing and complete regional availability, please refer the Amazon RDS for SQL Server Pricing page.