AWS Aurora: Getting Close to Multi-Region Active/Active
Every production architecture conversation I've had in the last five years eventually lands on the same question: can we go active/active across regions? The answer with Aurora has historically been "sort of, with significant caveats." Aurora Global Database gives you cross-region reads and fast failover. Write forwarding lets secondary regions send writes to the primary. Aurora DSQL promises genuine multi-region active/active with strong consistency. Each of these represents a different point on the spectrum between "one region writes, everyone else reads" and "any region writes, strong consistency everywhere." I've deployed all of them. The operational reality of each is more nuanced than the marketing suggests.