AWS Aurora – High Availability with Different Schema on Replicas

This seems to be the best method: Script the Publication -> Drop Subscriptions -> Drop Publication -> Re-create them

I was hoping there would be a 'trick' with replication where I could leave subscribers in place and just script out the publisher and recreate it. I don't see a clear way to restart replication without doing a full rebuild/reinitialise.

What I have noted is that this method does work pretty well once you have established replication for a database, worked out all the issues, scripted it all out; running those scripts does simplify the process.

Hope this helps someone

The secondary replica can't be changed inside; and no you can't add indexes.

You can do subsets and add indexes on the transactional subscriber of something but you will likely encounter issues if you ever need to modify your source tables (such as upgrading the application) or reload data for any other reason; it's good practice to remove it before any change then reapply after and then apply your own changes.

Also replication often fails for any numbers of reasons. Basically just a warning that it's likely ongoing work and monitoring rather than set and forget.

For the latter part of your question, you don't have to add it to the AG if you don't want to. I'm not sure what you're getting at.