SAA-C03 Practice Question: RDS Proxy pools and reuses database connections.
A video platform uses Amazon Aurora. The workload has many short-lived database connections from Lambda functions, causing connection storms. What should be added? The design must avoid adding custom operational scripts.
⚠ Common exam trap
Many exam-takers think scaling the database (e.g., using Aurora Auto Scaling) or adding more compute resources solves connection storms, but the real bottleneck is the connection overhead itself, which RDS Proxy directly addresses without custom scripts.
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
RDS Proxy
RDS Proxy is the correct choice because it sits between Lambda functions and the Aurora database, pooling and reusing database connections. This prevents connection storms by reducing the overhead of establishing new connections for each short-lived Lambda invocation, without requiring custom scripts or application changes.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
S3 Select
Why it's wrong here
S3 Select is a service that uses SQL expressions to retrieve only a subset of data from objects in Amazon S3, reducing the data transferred across the network. While it is useful for analytics on data stored in S3, it has no role in managing, pooling, or scaling database connections to Amazon Aurora. Therefore, enabling S3 Select would not mitigate a burst of short connections that overwhelms Aurora's connection limit.
- ✗
An internet gateway
Why it's wrong here
An internet gateway is a horizontally scaled, redundant VPC component that enables communication between a VPC and the internet, typically used for public subnets and NAT requirements. It operates at the network layer and does not understand or manage application-level database connections, nor does it sit in front of Aurora to pool or queue connection requests. Even if the workload reaches Aurora through public endpoints, the internet gateway cannot prevent connection exhaustion or reduce the connection setup overhead.
- ✗
A larger Route 53 hosted zone
Why it's wrong here
A larger Amazon Route 53 hosted zone simply means the ability to host more DNS records or manage more domains; it does not alter the behavior or capacity of database connections. Route 53 only resolves names to IPs (or aliases) and has no visibility into the TCP connection pool or the Aurora endpoint's connection limit. Increasing the hosted zone's quotas would do nothing to absorb a connection storm, because the bottleneck is the database's max connections, not DNS resolution throughput.
- ✓
RDS Proxy
Why this is correct
RDS Proxy is a fully managed, highly available database proxy that sits between the application and Amazon Aurora, maintaining a pool of established connections and reusing them for multiple app sessions. It dramatically reduces the overhead of opening and closing connections, which is particularly valuable for serverless applications like AWS Lambda that scale quickly and create connection storms. By multiplexing client connections through a small set of persistent connections, RDS Proxy keeps Aurora within its max connection limits and also improves failover resilience by preserving connection paths.
Visual reference
Quick reference
Cloud Service Model Comparison
| Model | You Manage | Provider Manages | Examples |
|---|---|---|---|
| IaaS | OS, runtime, apps, data | Hardware, hypervisor, networking | EC2, Azure VMs, GCP Compute Engine |
| PaaS | Apps and data | OS, runtime, middleware, hardware | Elastic Beanstalk, Azure App Service |
| SaaS | Data and settings only | Everything else | Microsoft 365, Salesforce, Workday |
| FaaS / Serverless | Function code only | Infra, scaling, runtime | Lambda, Azure Functions, Cloud Run |
| CaaS | Containers and apps | Kubernetes, OS, hardware | EKS, AKS, GKE |
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JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This SAA-C03 practice question is part of Courseiva's free Amazon Web Services certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the SAA-C03 exam.