Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for MariaDB now supports delayed replication, allowing you to set a configurable time period by which a read replica lags behind the source database. In a standard MariaDB replication configuration, there is minimal replication delay between the source and the replica. With delayed replication, you can introduce an intentional delay as a strategy for disaster recovery.

A delay can be helpful when you want to recover from a manual error. For example, if someone accidentally drops a table from your primary database, you can stop the replication just before the point at which the table was dropped and promote the replica to become a standalone instance. To assist with this process, Amazon RDS for MariaDB now includes a stored procedure that will stop replication once a specified point in the binary log is reached.