Building serverless applications with AWS Lambda and Amazon RDS promises scalability and reduced operational overhead, but debugging their integration can be tricky. We often encounter missing dependencies, VPC connectivity problems, or blocked internet access.

In this Cloud Lab, you’ll learn how to solve similar issues when creating a backend where AWS Lambda connects to Amazon RDS. You’ll begin by deploying an Amazon RDS instance and creating a Lambda function with code to read data from the RDS database. You’ll observe and investigate multiple failure points as the function attempts to access the database and external APIs. Along the way, you’ll fix these issues using Lambda layers or deployment packages, VPC networking updates, and NAT gateway configuration. Each fix builds toward a final architecture where Lambda can successfully connect to RDS and the public internet.

Completing this Cloud Lab will give you hands-on experience diagnosing and fixing common issues in a backend where AWS Lambda interacts with Amazon RDS. You’ll understand how to troubleshoot library dependencies, VPC-related connectivity, and outbound internet access while learning best practices for building reliable, production-ready AWS architectures.

Here’s a high-level architecture diagram of the infrastructure that you’ll create in this Cloud Lab:

Debugging a Lambda function connecting to Amazon RDS