In my last blog How tech culture can contribute to quality I focused on how passion and motivation builds a tech culture. This helps people develop themselves in a positive way while organisations are more successful in delivering high quality solutions. So basically everyone wins. In this post I want to dive into how we can help educate the community in a way that they understand not only what to do with certain knowledge, but also why things work in a specific way.

Amazon Web Services offers a way to connect to a MySQL or PostgreSQL database without having a password, instead an authentication token can be used.
Within AWS this type of authentication is called RDS IAM.
Users don’t need to store an username and password and credentials don’t need to be stored in the database, which makes this a secure authentication method.

So, this makes it interesting to use this in your Spring Boot application. Spring Boot will use a HikariCP connection pool by default, but HikariCP 4.0.3 doesn’t support the use of authentication tokens.

So, how do I make this work within my Spring Boot application?