A Distributed Availability Group (DAG) spans two AGs, each spanning one or more replica nodes and functioning as primary or secondary AG. A primary AG is replicated to the secondary AG synchronously or asynchronously. A failover in the DAG results in the AGs swapping their roles. Multiple DAGs can be linked together as a chain, which provides many useful features including disaster recovery across geographical regions, massive read scale (numerous readable secondary nodes), online migration of databases (across different operating systems and computing environments). The systems using DAGs can replicate databases across multiple independent high availability (HA) failover clusters using complex replication topologies and allow for manual failover and failback. The systems allow chaining of multiple AGs to provision a treelike structure of replicas and numerous secondary replicas without impacting performance. The systems automatically seed new database replicas to facilitate building a complex topology of DAGs.