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ApsaraDB RDS:What is ApsaraDB RDS for MySQL

Last Updated:Mar 30, 2026

ApsaraDB RDS for MySQL is an online database service built on a branch of MySQL source code, offering high performance. It is a proven solution that has handled large volumes of concurrent traffic during Double 11.

Some features described in this document may not be available in your region. The terms in your commercial contract take precedence. This document is provided for reference only, without warranty of any kind.

Basic features

ApsaraDB RDS for MySQL provides the following basic features:

  • Whitelist configuration

  • Backup and recovery

  • Transparent Data Encryption (TDE)

  • Data migration

  • Management of instances, accounts, and databases

For a complete list of features, see RDS MySQL feature overview.

Advanced capabilities

ApsaraDB MyBase dedicated clusters

Deploy RDS instances on dedicated hosts — including ECS instances of the ecs.i2.xlarge type and ECS Bare Metal instances — for stronger resource isolation. See What is ApsaraDB MyBase?

Read-only instances

When read traffic overwhelms the primary instance, create one or more read-only instances to offload reads and increase overall throughput. See Overview of read-only ApsaraDB RDS for MySQL instances.

Read/write splitting

The read/write splitting endpoint automatically routes write requests to the primary instance and distributes read requests across read-only instances by weight. To scale read capacity, add more read-only instances. See Read/write splitting.

Database proxy

The database proxy runs on dedicated compute resources and provides:

  • Read/write splitting

  • Short-lived connection optimization

  • Transaction splitting

See What are database proxies?

Database Autonomy Service (DAS)

DAS supports intelligent diagnostics and optimization based on various metrics, including SQL execution performance, CPU utilization, input/output operations per second (IOPS) utilization, memory usage, storage usage, number of connections, locks, and hotspot tables. See DAS overview.

To get help with complex production issues, purchase a support plan to access enterprise instant messaging (IM) groups, technical account managers (TAMs), and service managers. For product details, visit the ApsaraDB RDS for MySQL product page.

Key concepts

Term Definition
Instance A database process with dedicated physical memory. Instance performance scales with memory size. After creation, you can resize or delete the instance.
Database A logical unit within an instance. One instance can host multiple databases, each with a unique name on that instance.
Region A physical data center location. Each region contains multiple zones.
Zone An isolated location within a region with independent power and networking.

General terms

Term Definition
On-premises database A database running in your own data center, or any database not hosted on ApsaraDB RDS.
ApsaraDB RDS for XX ApsaraDB RDS running a specific database engine. XX can be MySQL, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, or MariaDB. For example, ApsaraDB RDS for MySQL runs the MySQL database engine.

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