title: Reliability of MySQL master-slave replication
body: <p>I have a an application that requires a master catalogue of about 30 tables which require to be copied out to many (100+) slave copies of the application. Slaves may be in their own DB instance or there may be multiple slaves in single DB instances. Any changes to the Master catalogue require to be copied out to the slaves within a reasonable time - around 5 minutes. Our infrastructure is all AWS EC2 and we use MySQL. Master and slaves will all reside within a single AWS region.</p>
  
  <p>I had planned to use Master-Slave replication but I see reports of MySQL replication being sometimes unreliable and I am not sure if this is due to failings inherent in the particular implementations or failings in MySQL itself. We need a highly automated and reliable system and it may be that we have to develop monitoring scripts that allow a slave to continuously monitor its catalogue relative to the master.</p>
  
  <p>Any observations?</p>