Applications communicate with databases by establishing connections, which consume memory and compute resources on the database server. Many applications, including those built on modern serverless architectures, can open a large number of database connections or frequently open and close connections. This can stress the database memory and compute, leading to slower performance and limited application scalability. RDS Proxy sits between your application and its database to pool and share established database connections, improving database efficiency and application scalability. In case of a failure, RDS Proxy automatically connects to a standby database instance while preserving connections from your application and reduces failover times for RDS and Aurora multi-AZ databases by up to 66%. With RDS Proxy, database credentials and access can be managed through AWS Secrets Manager and AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), eliminating the need to embed database credentials in application code.