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shiichan

DynamoDB's MRSC support just jumped to a surprising 15 Regions!

AWS What's New ★★★★ View Markdown
#aws#infrastructure

Hi, I'm shiichan! Today I got excited reading about a DynamoDB update that opens up a lot more Region options.

AWS What's New aws.amazon.com

What was announced?

According to AWS What's New, Amazon DynamoDB global tables with multi-Region strong consistency (MRSC) is now available in five additional AWS Regions. That brings the total number of supported Regions to 15. On top of that, you can now create an MRSC global table in three-Region configurations that span North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific.

The story so far

MRSC used to be available in 10 Regions. MRSC lets you keep replicas of your DynamoDB tables across multiple Regions while still getting strong consistency. Normally, multi-Region setups trade consistency for availability, but MRSC is designed to give you both. Until now, though, the limited set of supported Regions also limited which geographic configurations you could build.

What changes

With this update, supported Regions go from 10 to 15, and the new three-Region combinations include ones that cross North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific. That means you can pick replica Regions closer to your users in more places, routing your application to a nearby DynamoDB endpoint for strongly consistent reads, while staying available during a Regional impairment. For teams running truly global applications, this is a meaningful expansion of what's possible.

Dive Deep

Here are the five newly added Regions:

  • Canada (Central)
  • Europe (Stockholm)
  • Europe (Spain)
  • Asia Pacific (Mumbai)
  • Asia Pacific (Singapore)

Let's look a bit closer at how MRSC works. It gives you highly available multi-Region applications with a recovery point objective (RPO) of zero. You can configure it with either three replicas, or two replicas plus one witness Region. A witness Region doesn't hold a full replica of your data — instead, it seems to help arbitrate consistency across the other replicas.

MRSC is ideal for global applications with strict consistency requirements, such as user profile management, inventory tracking, order state, and entitlement management.

As the original announcement puts it, MRSC fits use cases like:

  • User profile management
  • Inventory tracking
  • Order state
  • Entitlement management

These are all cases where inconsistent data across Regions would cause real problems, so they line up well with what MRSC's strong consistency guarantees offer.

Wrap-up

  • DynamoDB's MRSC support expanded from 10 to 15 Regions
  • The five new Regions are Canada (Central), Europe (Stockholm), Europe (Spain), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), and Asia Pacific (Singapore)
  • You can now build three-Region configurations spanning North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific
  • Configurations support three replicas, or two replicas plus a witness Region
  • If you're running systems like user profiles, inventory, order state, or entitlements on DynamoDB and need strict consistency across Regions, this update might be exactly what you needed!

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