What is Amazon RDS Proxy?
Amazon RDS Proxy is a fully managed, highly available database proxy for Amazon RDS and Aurora. It sits between your application and the database, pools connections efficiently, and thereby improves scalability, availability, and security. RDS Proxy is essential for serverless architectures with AWS Lambda.
The main problem RDS Proxy solves: serverless applications frequently open many short lived database connections. Without connection pooling, this can overload the database or lead to connection limit errors. RDS Proxy maintains a pool of persistent connections to the database and assigns them efficiently to application requests.
Core Features
- Connection Pooling: Reuse of database connections for better resource utilization
- Faster Failover: Reduces failover times by up to 66% for Multi-AZ deployments
- IAM Authentication: Connections without database credentials in the application
- Secrets Manager Integration: Automatic credential rotation without application changes
- TLS Encryption: End to end encryption between application and database
Typical Use Cases
Serverless Applications with Lambda
AWS Lambda functions potentially create a new database connection with each invocation. Under high load, this can mean thousands of concurrent connections. RDS Proxy pools these connections and significantly reduces the load on the database. You can scale Lambda with Aurora without exceeding connection limits.
Microservice Architectures
In microservice environments with many independent services using the same database, RDS Proxy consolidates connections. Instead of each service managing its own connection pool, RDS Proxy handles this centrally and optimizes overall usage.
High Availability for Critical Applications
RDS Proxy significantly improves failover scenarios. During a database outage, the proxy automatically redirects to a new instance without applications noticing connection errors. Failover time is reduced from typically 60 seconds to under 30 seconds.
Advantages
- Improved scalability for serverless and microservice architectures
- Faster failover without application changes
- Simplified security through IAM based authentication
- Reduced database load through efficient connection pooling
Integration with innFactory
As an AWS Reseller, innFactory supports you with Amazon RDS Proxy: architecture design for serverless applications, integration into existing RDS and Aurora deployments, IAM and Secrets Manager configuration, and performance optimization.
Typical Use Cases
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Amazon RDS Proxy?
Amazon RDS Proxy is a fully managed database proxy for Amazon RDS and Aurora. It pools and shares database connections, improves application scalability, and reduces failover times by up to 66%.
When should I use RDS Proxy?
RDS Proxy is ideal for serverless applications with Lambda that open many short lived connections, for applications with many concurrent connections, and when you need faster failover times with Multi-AZ deployments.
How does RDS Proxy improve security?
RDS Proxy integrates with AWS Secrets Manager for automatic credential rotation and supports IAM authentication. Applications connect to the proxy without needing direct database credentials.
Which databases are supported?
RDS Proxy supports Amazon RDS for MySQL and PostgreSQL as well as Amazon Aurora MySQL and Aurora PostgreSQL. It is available in all regions where these databases are supported.