AWS Certification - Load Balance

RDS Proxy

Benefits

Improved application performance

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.

Increase application availability

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%.

Manage application security

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 AWS Secrets Manager.

Use cases

Serverless application development

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.

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and eCommerce applications

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.

Aurora Serverless

Amazon Aurora Serverless is an on-demand, autoscaling configuration for Amazon Aurora. It automatically starts up, shuts down, and scales capacity up or down based on your application's needs. You can run your database on AWS without managing database capacity.

Manually managing database capacity can take up valuable time and can lead to inefficient use of database resources. With Aurora Serverless, you create a database, specify the desired database capacity range, and connect your applications. You pay on a per-second basis for the database capacity that you use when the database is active, and migrate between standard and serverless configurations with a few steps in the Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) console.

V1

Aurora Serverless v1 is available for both Amazon Aurora with MySQL compatibility and Amazon Aurora with PostgreSQL compatibility.

Use cases:

Infrequently-used applications

You have an application that is only used for a few minutes several times per day or week, such as a low-volume blog site, and you want a cost-effective database that only requires you to pay when it's active. With Aurora Serverless v1, you only pay for the database resources you consume.

Development and test databases

Your software development and QA teams are using databases during work hours, but don’t need them on nights or weekends. With Aurora Serverless v1, your database automatically shuts down when not in use, and starts up much more quickly when work starts the next day.

V2

Amazon Aurora Serverless v2 scales instantly to hundreds of thousands of transactions in a fraction of a second. As it scales, it adjusts capacity in fine-grained increments to provide the right amount of database resources that the application needs. There is no database capacity for you to manage. You pay only for the capacity your application consumes, and you can save up to 90% of your database cost compared to the cost of provisioning capacity for peak load.

Aurora Serverless v2 supports all manner of database workloads. Examples include development and test environments, websites, and applications that have infrequent, intermittent, or unpredictable workloads to the most demanding, business critical applications that require high scale and high availability. It supports the full breadth of Aurora features, including global database, Multi-AZ deployments, and read replicas. Aurora Serverless v2 is available for the Amazon Aurora MySQL-Compatible Edition and PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition.

Use cases:

Variable workloads

You're running an infrequently-used application, with peaks of 30 minutes to several hours a few times each day or several times per year, such as a human resources, budgeting, or operational reporting application. You no longer have to provision to peak capacity, which would require you to pay for resources you don't continuously use, or to average capacity, which would risk performance problems and a poor user experience.

Unpredictable workloads

You're running workloads with database usage throughout the day, and also peaks of activity that are hard to predict. For example, a traffic site that might see a surge of activity when it starts raining. Your database will automatically scale capacity to meet the needs of the application's peak load and scale back down when the surge of activity is over.

Enterprise database fleet management 

Enterprises with hundreds or thousands of applications, each backed by one or more databases, must manage resources for their entire database fleet. As application requirements fluctuate, continuously monitoring and adjusting capacity for each and every database to ensure high performance, high availability, and remaining under budget is a daunting task. With Aurora Serverless v2, database capacity is automatically adjusted based on application demand. You no longer need to manually manage thousands of databases in your database fleet. Features such as global database and Multi-AZ deployments ensure high availability and fast recovery.

Software as a service applications

Software as a service (SaaS) vendors typically operate hundreds or thousands of Aurora databases, each supporting a different customer, in a single cluster to improve utilization and cost efficiency. But they still need to manage each database individually, including monitoring for and responding to colocate databases in the same cluster that may take up more shared resources than originally planned. With Aurora Serverless v2, SaaS vendors can provision Aurora database clusters for each individual customer without worrying about costs of provisioned capacity. It automatically shuts down databases when they are not in use to save costs and instantly adjusts databases capacity to meet changing application requirements.

Scaled-out databases split across multiple servers

Customers with high write or read requirements often split databases across several instances to achieve higher throughput. However, customers often provision too many or too few instances, increasing cost or limiting scale. With Aurora Serverless v2, customers split databases across several Aurora instances and let the service adjust capacity instantly and automatically based on need. It seamlessly adjusts capacity for each node with no downtime or disruption, and uses only the amount of capacity needed to support applications.