Amazon RDS Proxy

Amazon RDS Proxy – now in preview – is a fully managed, highly available database proxy for Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) that makes applications more scalable, more resilient to database failures, and more secure.

Many applications, including those built on modern serverless architectures using AWS Lambda, can have a large number of open connections to the database server, and may open and close database connections at a high rate, exhausting database memory and compute resources. Amazon RDS Proxy allows applications to pool and share connections established with the database, improving database efficiency and application scalability. With RDS Proxy, failover times for Aurora and RDS databases are reduced by up to 66% and database credentials, authentication, and access can be managed through integration with AWS Secrets Manager and AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM).

Amazon RDS Proxy can be enabled for most applications with no code change, and you don’t need to provision or manage any additional infrastructure. Pricing is simple and predictable: you pay per vCPU of the database instance for which the proxy is enabled. Amazon RDS Proxy supports Amazon RDS for MySQL and Amazon Aurora with MySQL compatibility. Support for Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL and Amazon Aurora with PostgreSQL compatibility is coming soon.

Amazon RDS Proxy sits between your application and your relational database to efficiently manage connections to the database and improve scalability of the application.

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 of application connections and frequency of connection establishment, so your application can scale without compromising performance. 

Amazon RDS Proxy is highly available and deployed over multiple Availability Zones (AZs). 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, rather than rely on DNS changes to reroute requests – a time consuming process – 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 to avoid the risky practice of hard coding database credentials into application code. RDS Proxy also enables you to centrally manage database credentials using AWS 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 is a fully managed database proxy feature for Amazon RDS, giving you all 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 code. You simply point your application connections to the proxy instead of the RDS database, and the rest is managed seamlessly.

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.

You can get started with Amazon RDS Proxy in just a few clicks by going to the Amazon RDS or AWS Lambda console and creating an Amazon RDS Proxy endpoint for your RDS databases. You can then point your application to the Amazon RDS Proxy endpoint.