A company runs a serverless ecommerce application on AWS. The application uses API Gateway to invoke Java Lambda functions that connect to an Amazon RDS for MySQL database. During a sale event…

While moving DB connection initialization outside the handler is good practice, it doesn't solve the core issue of the database being overwhelmed by too many connections, and provisioned concurrency doesn't directly address DB connection limits.

Amazon RDS Proxy manages database connection pooling, effectively multiplexing a large number of Lambda connections to a smaller, fixed set of database connections, preventing the database from being overwhelmed. Storing credentials in Secrets Manager securely integrates with RDS Proxy, minimizing application code changes to point to the proxy endpoint.

Increasing `max_connections` directly on the database might temporarily mitigate failures but can strain database resources, potentially degrading performance, and requires a reboot causing downtime.

Increasing reserved concurrency limits the maximum number of concurrent Lambda executions, which can prevent overwhelming the database but does not improve database connection management efficiency like RDS Proxy.