SAP-C02 Design for New Solutions Practice Question
A company is designing a new serverless application using AWS Lambda. The function needs to access an Amazon RDS database. Which THREE practices should be followed to avoid connection exhaustion?
⚠ Common exam trap
Watch out — candidates often assume storing a connection in a global variable is sufficient to reuse it across invocations, but they overlook that concurrent invocations run in separate execution environments, each with its own global scope, leading to multiple connections and potential exhaustion.
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
✓
Use Amazon RDS Proxy to pool connections
Amazon RDS Proxy sits between Lambda and the database, managing a pool of established connections. It reduces the overhead of opening and closing connections per invocation and prevents Lambda from exhausting database connections during concurrent executions. This is the recommended pattern for serverless applications with relational databases.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Store the database connection in a global variable to reuse across invocations
Why it's wrong here
Lambda instances are recycled; global variables are not shared across invocations.
- ✗
Assign a static IP address to the Lambda function
Why it's wrong here
Static IP does not affect connection exhaustion.
- ✓
Use Amazon RDS Proxy to pool connections
Why this is correct
RDS Proxy manages connection pooling for Lambda.
- ✓
Open the database connection only when needed and close it after each invocation
Why this is correct
Minimizes open connections.
- ✓
Increase the maximum number of database connections in the RDS parameter group
Why this is correct
Allows more concurrent connections.
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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This SAP-C02 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 SAP-C02 exam.