User authentication and session management with Amazon Aurora DSQL

This article demonstrates how to build a user authentication and session management service using Amazon Aurora DSQL, a serverless PostgreSQL-compatible distributed database with strong consistency and IAM-based authentication.

• Amazon Aurora DSQL provides strong read-after-write consistency, eliminating replication lag in authentication flows
• IAM-based authentication eliminates database passwords; the Aurora DSQL connector auto-generates short-lived tokens
• Architecture uses Amazon ECS Express Mode for compute, Aurora DSQL for data, and IAM for security
• Data model uses UUIDs as primary keys, application-level referential integrity, and token hashing for security
• Optimistic Concurrency Control (OCC) handles concurrent writes without locks; built-in retry helpers manage serialization errors
• Async index creation enables schema changes without blocking reads or writes
• Production setup uses least-privilege database roles mapped to IAM principals, not the admin role
• Batch-based cleanup jobs handle expired and revoked session purging within 3,000-row transaction limits

Aurora DSQL simplifies authentication services by removing infrastructure management, providing strong consistency by default, and securing connections through IAM instead of passwords.