Relieve pressure on your source database with additional read capacity

Bring data close to your applications in different regions

Promote a Read Replica to a master for faster recovery in the event of a disaster

Upgrade a Read Replica to a new engine version

Supported for MySQL, MariaDB, and PostgreSQL  

It allows you to have a read-only copy of your production database. This is achieved by using Asynchronous replication from the primary RDS instance to the reach replica. You use read replicas primarily for very read-heavy database workloads.