An application uses an Amazon RDS for MySQL Multi-AZ DB instance in us-east-1. After performing a failover test, the application lost DB connections and could not reconnect; only after restarting the application did connections recover. Design a solution so the application can re-establish connections after a failover without requiring an application restart.

The correct solution is to create an Amazon RDS Proxy, register the existing RDS DB instance as a target, and change the application to connect to the RDS Proxy endpoint. RDS Proxy maintains a pool of database connections and automatically routes application requests to the primary DB instance after a failover, masking the failover event from the application. This allows the application to re-establish connections without requiring a restart. Migrating to Aurora MySQL Serverless v1 or a two-node Aurora cluster would involve significant changes and might not directly solve the connection re-establishment issue during failover without additional mechanisms like RDS Proxy. Exporting data to S3 and querying with Athena is for analytics, not a transactional database solution, and would not maintain live application connections.