Amazon RDS for SQL Server now supports Always On Availability Groups for Standard Edition

Amazon RDS for SQL Server now offers Always On Availability Groups (AGs) for the Multi-AZ configuration in all AWS Regions on Standard Edition. This new high-availability option meets the requirements of enterprise-grade production workloads on SQL Server.

The Multi-AZ deployment option provides enhanced availability and data durability by automatically replicating databases between two AWS Availability Zones (in the same region). These Availability Zones offer you an easier and more effective way to design and operate applications and databases, making them more highly available, fault tolerant, and scalable than traditional single-datacenter infrastructures or multi-datacenter infrastructures.

When you create a SQL Server database instance using the Multi-AZ configuration on the latest SQL Server 2019 version for the Standard Edition database engine, Amazon RDS automatically provisions a primary node in one Availability Zone and maintains a synchronous "standby" replica in a different Availability Zone using AGs. In the event of planned database maintenance or unplanned service disruption, Amazon RDS automatically fails over the SQL Server DB instance to the up-to-date standby so that database operations can resume quickly.

If you are already on a version that supports AGs in the Multi-AZ configuration, you will need to first convert the DB instance to the Single-AZ availability type, and then re-apply the Multi-AZ flag. To learn more visit here.

With AGs, you can easily connect to the listener endpoint in order to have faster fail-over times. To learn more visit the Amazon RDS User Guide.

Please visit Amazon RDS for SQL Server Pricing for complete regional availability information.