Amazon RDS IAM Auth Now Scales Your Connection Rate Automatically!

Hey there, it's me, Shii-chan! Today I found a small but genuinely nice update for Amazon RDS, so let me walk you through it.

AWS What's New aws.amazon.com

What was announced?

According to AWS's What's New, Amazon RDS now supports dynamic connection scaling for IAM database authentication. The rate at which your instance accepts new connections now scales with the available instance resources, instead of sitting behind a fixed limit.

The story so far

Until now, IAM authentication came with a fixed limit on how fast new connections could be accepted. So workloads with sudden bursts of connections could bump into that ceiling.

What changes

From now on, the number of new IAM authentication requests your instance can handle depends on the available resources and your workload characteristics. In other words, the more headroom your instance has, the more connections it can take. That makes high-volume, enterprise-scale connection patterns much easier to handle.

Dive Deep

To get the best performance, AWS recommends reusing the IAM user or assumed role principals you use to generate tokens, and reusing the authentication tokens themselves when you can. This works with Amazon Aurora and Amazon RDS on the PostgreSQL, MySQL, and MariaDB engines, and it's available in every AWS Region where IAM database authentication is supported, including AWS GovCloud (US). For the details on how it all works, check out the IAM database authentication documentation.

Wrap-up

• Amazon RDS IAM authentication now scales the new-connection rate with your instance's resources
• The old fixed ceiling is gone; throughput grows with your resources and workload
• Supported on Aurora / RDS for PostgreSQL, MySQL, and MariaDB, in every Region where IAM auth is available (including GovCloud (US))
• Reusing token-generating principals and tokens helps you get the most out of it

If you run apps with bursty connection patterns on IAM authentication, this one's for you!