[hyperdimension]

I'm no DBA, but is that not the entire point of a cluster/replicas?

Sure, maybe writes won't be accepted or replicated until a new master is elected, but you can't even read from the cluster?

I'm curious at this point: what is it exactly that you gain from a cluster? Is it only having to wait 30s vs. however long it takes for the master to come back online?

[mnutt]

That was the mind-boggling part to me. After testing failover and noticing the behavior we had a number of discussions with AWS reps and support engineers that confirmed it. And Aurora's failover documentation hints at it but downplays the severity.

[aetherson]

The thing you gain from the replicas is removing read load from the primary during normal operations.