Designing a database for serverless, the biggest challenge in our mind was to build an infrastructure which supports per request pricing in a profitable way. We believe Upstash has achieved this. After we launched the product, we saw that there was another major challenge: Database connections!

As you know, Serverless Functions scale from 0 to infinity. This means when your functions get a lot of traffic, the cloud provider creates new containers (lambda functions) in parallel and scales out your backend. If you create a new database connection within the function then you can rapidly reach the connection limit of your database.

If you try to cache the connection outside the lambda functions then another problem occurs. When AWS freezes your Lambda function, it does not close the connection. So you may end up with many idle/zombie connections which can still threaten.