How To Manage AWS RDS Database Connections?

Question

I'm fairly new when it comes to building and managing the back-end architecture of an application.

I'm hosting a Ruby on Rails application through AWS and one of the services I'm using is AWS RDS.

I've recently come across an issue where I reached the limit on the number of database connections I can make on my DB instance (seemingly as a result of Elastic Beanstalk deployments connecting to my DB when running the DB migrations, and not closing (?) the connections after it's done), and don't know how to best go about addressing it and managing it.

For anyone that has had experience using Amazon RDS with a PostgreSQL DB, what resources/services do I need to setup in order to make sure I manage my database connections correctly (so that I avoid the limit as much as possible)?

I have heard of PGBouncer for managing Database Connections, but I was wondering if there were other resources/services that anyone else can share so that I can make a more informed decision on what to use.

Answer 1

Had a similar issue myself awhile back. You can look into the Rails Reaper as well to see if that suits your purposes, but it was PGBouncer that ended up fixing my issue