Data replication between data centers: Log shipping vs. Cross Datacenter Replication

Aerospike's Cross Datacenter Replication (XDR) is an essential tool for increasing data availability, global performance, and disaster recovery. XDR replicates data asynchronously between database clusters operating in different data centers, providing fine-grained control, low-latency transfer, and efficient data transfer. In contrast, log shipping is a basic method that relies on backing up transaction logs from a primary database and restoring them to one or more secondary databases, but it is not real-time and has limitations such as storage and network bandwidth usage. XDR overcomes these challenges by leveraging fine-grained filtering, low-latency transfer, efficient use of resources, better handling of hot keys, improved scalability, tunable for unreliable networks, and failure handling without interruption. Additionally, XDR provides a rewind feature that allows users to rewind the replication of records from a specific point in time. Overall, Aerospike XDR offers several improvements over traditional log shipping replication, particularly in terms of flexibility, efficiency, and latency, making it suitable for distributed, real-time, and mission-critical applications.