Amazon RDS Proxy

Your Amazon RDS Proxy instance maintains a pool of established connections to your RDS database instances, reducing the stress on database compute and memory resources that typically occurs when new connections are established. RDS Proxy also shares infrequently used database connections, so that fewer connections access the RDS database. This connection pooling enables your database to efficiently support a large number and frequency of application connections so that your application can scale without compromising performance.

RDS Proxy minimizes application disruption from outages affecting the availability of your database by automatically connecting to a new database instance while preserving application connections. When failovers occur, RDS Proxy routes requests directly to the new database instance. This reduces failover times for Aurora and RDS databases by up to 66%.

Amazon RDS Proxy gives you additional control over data security by giving you the choice to enforce IAM authentication for database access and avoid hard coding database credentials into application code. RDS Proxy also enables you to centrally manage database credentials using Amazon Secrets Manager.

A database proxy server helps handle additional load on your database. While traditional proxy servers allow applications to scale more effectively, they are difficult to deploy, patch, and manage – consuming time and energy that could be better spent on developing great products. Amazon RDS Proxy gives you the benefits of a database proxy without requiring additional burden of patching and managing your own proxy server. RDS Proxy is completely serverless and scales automatically to accommodate your workload.

Amazon RDS Proxy is fully compatible with the protocols of supported database engines, so you can deploy RDS Proxy for your application without making changes to your application code. You simply point your application connections to the proxy instead of the RDS database, and the rest is managed seamlessly.

Amazon RDS Proxy is highly available and deployed over multiple Availability Zones (AZs) to protect you from infrastructure failure. Each AZ runs on its own physically distinct, independent infrastructure and is engineered to be highly reliable. In the unlikely event of an infrastructure failure, the RDS Proxy endpoint remains online and consistent allowing your application to continue to run database operations.

With Amazon RDS Proxy you can build serverless applications that are more scalable and more available because they use your relational databases more efficiently. Modern serverless applications support highly variable workloads and may attempt to open a burst of new database connections or keep many connections open but idle. A surge of connections or a large number of open connections could strain your database server, leading to slower queries and limited application scalability. By pooling and sharing already established database connections, RDS Proxy allows you to efficiently scale to many more connections from your serverless application. RDS Proxy also enables you to maintain predictable database performance by controlling the total number of database connections that are opened. Finally, RDS Proxy preserves the availability of your serverless application by denying unserviceable application connections that may degrade the performance of your database.

SaaS or eCommerce applications often keep a large number of database connections open to ensure quick user response times, although only a fraction of these open connections may get actively used at a given moment. These open but idle connections still consume database memory and compute resources. Instead of over-provisioning your database to support mostly idling connections, you can use RDS Proxy to hold idling connections from your application while only establishing database connections as required to optimally serve active requests.