Disaster recovery solution for ApsaraDB RDS instances

Multi-zone ApsaraDB RDS instances

Alibaba Cloud provides cloud computing services for regions around the world. Each region consists of multiple zones. Zones in the same region have low network latency, and a fault in one zone does not affect the services in other zones.

If you select the single-zone deployment method, your database system is deployed on two physical servers that reside in the same zone. All racks, air conditioners, circuits, and networking in the zone are redundant to ensure high availability. ApsaraDB RDS provides service availability that goes beyond the limits of physical servers by using the asynchronous or semi synchronous replication mode and an efficient primary/secondary failover mechanism.

To provide higher availability than a single zone, ApsaraDB RDS supports database system deployment in different zones in the same region. If you select the multi-zone deployment method, your database system is deployed on two physical servers that reside in different zones. If one zone fails, your database service can be switched over to the other zone within a short period of time. The switchover process is transparent and does not require changes to the application code.

DTS-based disaster recovery

You can use Data Transmission Service (DTS) to synchronize data from a database in your self-managed data center or a self-managed database on your Elastic Compute Service (ECS) instance to your RDS instance in any region in real time. If unexpected exceptions, such as data center damages, occur, you can obtain database data from your RDS instance. For more information, see Configure a data synchronization task by using the new DTS console.