Database connections from legacy ctl and ops are different and should be unified

[sanders41]

Currently the way the app connects to the database is different between legacy ctl and ops. This caused some issues when trying to combine conftest.py files here #2669. It also make the code base harder in general to work with because you need to know which connection to use.

Because the ctl connection provides an async option in addition to the sync option I think we should go in that direction. This will however be a big change for the ops code and won't be a quick fix.