After Aurora Cluster DB failover, unable to write to DB

Question

Right now I am connecting to a cluster endpoint that I have set up for an Aurora DB-MySQL compatible cluster, and after I do a "failover" from the AWS console, my web application is unable to properly connect to the DB that should be writable.

My setup is like this:

Java Web App (tomcat8) with HikariCP as the connection pool, with ConnecterJ as the driver for MySQL. I am evaluating Aurora-MySQL to see if it will satisfy some of the needs the application has. The web app sits in an EC2 instance that is in the same VPC and SG as the Aurora-MySQL cluster. I am connecting through the cluster endpoint to get to the database.

After a failover, I would expect HikariCP to break connections (it does), and then attempt to reconnect (it does), however, the application must be connecting to the wrong server, because anytime a write is hit to the database, a SQL Exception is thrown that says:

The MySQL server is running with the --read-only option so it cannot execute this statement

What is the solution here? Should I rework my code to flush DNS after all connections go down, or after I start receiving this error, and then try to re-initiate connections after that? That doesn't seem right...

Answer 1

I don't know why I keep asking questions if I just answer them (I should really be more patient), but here's an answer in case anyone stumbles upon this in a Google search:

RDS uses DNS changes when working with the cluster endpoint to make it looks "seamless". Since the IP behind the hostname can change, if there is any sort of caching going on, then you can see pretty quickly how a change won't be reflected. Here's a page from AWS' docs that go into it a bit more: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/sdk-for-java/v1/developer-guide/java-dg-jvm-ttl.html

To resolve my issue, I went into the jvm's security file and then changed it to be 0 just to verify if what was happening was correct. Seems correct. Now I just need to figure out how to do it properly...