Amazon Redshift Improves Performance of Inter-Region Snapshot Transfers

Performance enhancements have been made that allow Amazon Redshift to copy snapshots across regions much faster, allowing customers to support much more aggressive Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) Disaster Recovery (DR) policies. The performance of copying a snapshot across regions is now orders of magnitude faster than what was achievable earlier this year, with up to 40,000 MB/s transfer rates observed.

Amazon Redshift provides several features to ensure data is securely backed up both in the local and remote regions. Snapshots to S3 are automatically created on active clusters every 8 hours or when an amount of data equal to 5 GB per node changes. Cross-region snapshots can also be enabled, which will copy incremental changes to a secondary/DR region, allowing for a Redshift cluster to be recovered in another region. Depending upon the snapshot policy configured on the primary cluster, the snapshot updates can either be scheduled, or based upon data change, and then any updates automatically replicated to the secondary/DR region automatically.

The combination of these features, along with the performance improvements introduced for copying snapshots across regions, allows Redshift customers to implement a cross-region DR policy.

You can find more information about copying snapshots between regions in the Amazon Redshift Cluster Management Guide. The performance improvements for copying snapshots across regions are available in release version 1.0.2762 or higher in all AWS commercial regions.