Lambda Is Exhausting Your RDS Connections. Raise the Limit?
Under load, Lambda functions fail with too many connections to RDS. A teammate wants to bump max_connections. Defend the real fix.
the decision you defend
During traffic spikes your Lambda functions start failing with too many connections errors against RDS. A teammate says just raise max_connections on the database. Do you agree, and what do you do instead?
the situation
Your API is backed by Lambda functions that read and write an RDS database. Normal traffic is fine, but during spikes a wave of invocations starts returning errors that the database has too many connections, and requests fail.
context
The functions open a fresh database connection at the start of each invocation. At peak the platform runs hundreds of concurrent invocations. RDS is a single instance sized for steady load. A teammate has opened the parameter group and wants to raise max_connections to make the errors stop.
How this challenge works
Take a position on the decision above and defend it. A senior-engineer AI will push back over up to 5 rounds. When you are done, you are scored against a verified rubric so you can see exactly what a complete answer covers - these are learning prompts, not gotchas.