Handling database connections while scaling up - RDS Proxy

Earlier this week I posted about some aspects to consider when designing the mechanisms to scale microservices up and down.  One of the key takeaways was that an underlying database could impose limitations on how far to scale up compute resources due to connection limitations.

This afternoon I noticed a tweet refering to a new feature that AWS have announced that could simplify the management of database connections.  Amazon RDS Proxy is currently in preview and only available for RDS MySQL and Aurora MySQL in a limited number of regions.

I believe that it will go some way towards solving two problems that I have encountered:

1. Prevent reaching maximum connection limit of database.
2. Reduce warm up time for lambdas that connect to a database.

According to the documentation it is also intended to detect and handle failover situations for clustered databases.

I'll wait until some examples show up for Java before I decide whether this will work for the types of applications that I am used to developing.