They are. RDS multi-AZ replication is synchronous. Aurora is asynchronous, and multi-region replication is asynchronous, but a multi-AZ deployment of the "tradi

They are. RDS multi-AZ replication is synchronous. Aurora is asynchronous, and multi-region replication is asynchronous, but a multi-AZ deployment of the "traditional" database engines in RDS is synchronous. It's rather the opposite of what you said before: if you stick to the old fashioned databases, this is easy to set up, failover is automatic, and no app-level changes are needed. I think you may have been thinking of multi-region, since you mentioned geographic failover. Multi-AZ isn't really geographic failover.