What Is Synchronous Replication?

Synchronous replication is like that friend who's always there for you, but sometimes it can be too much. Synchronous replication is a process for simultaneous updates of multiple repositories, often used with a storage area network, wireless network, or another segmented system. In synchronous replication, the technology writes data to two systems simultaneously rather than one simultaneously. This type of replication can be helpful when you want to protect against data loss or downtime. For example, if you have two servers that need to stay in sync, you could set up synchronous replication so that they both have the same information and are always up-to-date. Synchronous replicas are the most basic and common form of data replication. They're often used for disaster recovery or specific business goals and objectives, dependent on the availability of data. Synchronous replication is a simple concept: Multiple copies of data are maintained in real-time. It's also known as active-active replication because every copy of the data is always available to users. It means that if you make changes to one server, they'll be reflected everywhere immediately, and that's great if you need your users to always have access to up-to-date information. Synchronous replication is like a tennis match: both players are up simultaneously and must play the same game. Asynchronous replication, on the other hand, is more like an unevenly-matched game of ping-pong: you can only be sure what will happen once it happens. If you're playing a real-time game of tennis, your partner must always be ready to hit back at any time because if they're not prepared, you have to keep waiting for them until they are! If one player could always hit the ball back at any time, but the other was not well, that wouldn't be much of a game! If both players could hit balls back and forth whenever they wanted to? That could be fun.