With the foundational structure in place, Day 2 of our development sprint was about making the first real connection to our data. This is a critical milestone—the moment a system moves from a theoretical blueprint to a living application that can communicate with its database.
Connecting Securely: The Digital Safe
To access our database, our Lambda functions first need to retrieve credentials securely. We implemented a connection to AWS Secrets Manager, which acts as a digital vault. To optimize performance, we added strict timeouts and a “warm caching” mechanism. This ensures that once a function is active, it can reuse the credentials without delay, minimizing overhead on subsequent requests.
The First Real Data Path
Next, we built a reusable connection “pool” to our PostgreSQL database, ensuring all connections are secure with SSL. With the plumbing in place, we implemented our first true data function: listProperties. Initially, we validated the connection with a temporary data seed. Once confirmed, we replaced it with a proper read-only SELECT query.
By verifying the invocation and checking the logs, we confirmed success. The backend can now securely connect to the database and retrieve a list of properties. The engine has been turned on for the first time.