During high traffic, the primary relational database crashed but the replica was never promoted. What should you implement to avoid this in the future?

Implementing routinely scheduled failovers of your databases is the correct solution. This practice tests your disaster recovery procedures and ensures that your replica promotion mechanism works as expected. By regularly simulating a primary database failure and promoting the replica, you identify and resolve any issues in the failover process before a real incident occurs. Using a different database or choosing larger instances might address performance or scalability issues, but they don't directly solve the problem of a failed replica promotion. Creating snapshots more regularly is good for data recovery but doesn't guarantee that the replica can be promoted and take over as the new primary. The core problem is the operational readiness of the failover process, which scheduled failovers directly address.