SAP-C02 Design for New Solutions Practice Question
A company is designing a serverless application that uses AWS Lambda to process events from Amazon DynamoDB Streams. The Lambda function updates an Amazon RDS for MySQL database. The company expects a high volume of updates and is concerned about the Lambda function causing too many connections to the database. How should the company design the solution to manage the database connection pool effectively?
⚠ Common exam trap
It's easy for candidates to think batching or reducing concurrency is the solution, but the real challenge is managing connection reuse under elastic scaling, which only a dedicated proxy like RDS Proxy can solve without sacrificing throughput.
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 database connections, and configure the Lambda function to connect through the proxy.
Amazon RDS Proxy sits between the Lambda function and the RDS database, maintaining a pool of established connections. When Lambda invocations scale up, they reuse connections from the pool instead of opening new ones, preventing the database from being overwhelmed. This is the recommended AWS pattern for serverless applications with high concurrency and 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.
- ✗
Increase the Lambda function timeout and use a single database connection per function instance.
Why it's wrong here
Lambda instances can scale to hundreds, each opening a connection, overwhelming the database.
- ✓
Use Amazon RDS Proxy to pool database connections, and configure the Lambda function to connect through the proxy.
Why this is correct
RDS Proxy efficiently manages connection pooling and reduces load on the database.
- ✗
Use a singleton Lambda function with a reserved concurrency of 1 to ensure only one connection is used.
Why it's wrong here
Reserved concurrency of 1 will cause processing delays and potential loss of events.
- ✗
Use a Lambda function that batches records from DynamoDB Streams and uses a single database connection per batch.
Why it's wrong here
Each Lambda instance still opens a connection; with many instances, connections multiply.
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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