Do you see a surge in user read requests and your database struggling to keep up with the demand?
This is where you need to think about "read replicas".
Imagine a chef who has to take orders and cook food. Can he handle all customers during rush hour?
That’s why there are waiters — they take orders, relay them to the chef, and keep him free to focus on what he does best.
Your primary database is the chef.
Your read replicas are the waiters.
Instead of letting the primary database struggle with both read and write requests, you offload the read-heavy traffic to a read replica — an exact copy of your primary database whose sole purpose is to serve read queries. It maintains an asynchronous link with the primary DB and is incredibly useful in dashboards, reporting modules, and analytical workloads.
This small architectural shift makes a huge difference, especially in read-heavy applications or anything that constantly fetches data.