This article provides strategies for upgrading Amazon RDS for MySQL to version 8.0 and migrating to Multi-AZ DB Cluster deployments for improved performance and availability.

• Multi-AZ DB clusters include readable standbys that serve read traffic and provide automatic failover
• RDS Optimized Writes delivers up to 2x improvement in write transaction throughput
• RDS Optimized Reads provides up to 2x faster complex query processing
• Requires MySQL 8.0.28 or higher; version 8.0.30+ needed for Optimized Writes
• Supports only "d" type instance classes (db.m5d, db.r6gd, etc.)
• Migration option 1: Create Multi-AZ DB cluster as read replica with minimal downtime
• Migration option 2: Restore from RDS snapshot to Multi-AZ DB cluster
• Migration option 3: Use mysqldump with binary log replication for near-zero downtime
• Enable GTID mode and enforce_gtid_consistency parameters before read replica migration
• Monitor ReplicaLag metric to determine when cutover is safe

Multi-AZ DB clusters support read-heavy workloads and can scale with up to 15 additional read replicas, making them ideal for production workloads requiring high availability and consistent transaction latency.