I'm no DBA, but is that not the entire point of a cluster/replicas?
Sure, maybe writes won't be accepted or replicated until a new master is elected, but you can't even read from the cluster?
I'm curious at this point: what is it exactly that you gain from a cluster? Is it only having to wait 30s vs. however long it takes for the master to come back online?
That was the mind-boggling part to me. After testing failover and noticing the behavior we had a number of discussions with AWS reps and support engineers that confirmed it. And Aurora's failover documentation hints at it but downplays the severity.
Sure, maybe writes won't be accepted or replicated until a new master is elected, but you can't even read from the cluster?
I'm curious at this point: what is it exactly that you gain from a cluster? Is it only having to wait 30s vs. however long it takes for the master to come back online?