RDS Replication across regions

We are using Amazon AWS for our web services but given the recent instabilities in their infrastructure, we are trying to figure out how to run our application across multiple regions for additional redundancy.

Ideally, we would run our entire app in a active-active configuration in multiple regions but our main concern is that we are using RDS, which I understand cannot replicate across regions.

One possible solution (though we have not tried or proven it would work) would be to do mysqldump or EBS snapshots every hour or so but this would mean that we would be forced to run in an active-passive configuration. Our data would be at most an hour behind. This carries its own issues around data synchronization when we failover and the master comes back up, so its not the best solution.

Are there any proven solutions for replicating RDS across regions?

Solution 1:

I guess the short answer is: Cannot do this.

If you want to do this, you need to run your own MySQL instances instead of using RDS. Lame answer, and I am surprised that Amazon has decided to not support multiple region replication given their alleged dedication to scalable, redundant and fault tolerant infrastructure.

Oh well :\