Jon Simpson
Recovering lost Amazon RDS master user login details
The management console for Amazon RDS allows you to reset the master user password for your database instance, but there are no options (at present) to discover or reset the master user’s username. Since this is a parameter provided to the instance when you set it up instead of the MySQL default, it’s reasonably likely it may not be the default `root’.
The RDS command line tools allow you to discover the username as part of listing the parameters for your DB instances. The easiest way to get access to them is via a started Amazon Linux instance, which contains all of the tools required. You will need to have the X509 cert and private key files for your account (and for simplicity, export the paths to them on your instance into your shell environment as EC2_CERT and EC2_PRIVATE_KEY respectively).
The command rds-describe-db-instances will then allow you to list all of your RDS instances, although the tool defaults to the us-east-1 region. To find instances in other regions, such as eu-west-1 the command takes a parameter: rds-describe-db-instances --region eu-west-1. The output of the command will contain the master user name, along with other parameters of your instance.
DBINSTANCE instance-name 2011-03-18T02:42:42.663Z db.m1.small mysql
5 master_user_name available instance-name.eu-west-1.rds.amazonaws.com
3306 eu-west-1a 8 n 5.1.57
SECGROUP backend active
PARAMGRP default.mysql5.1 in-sync
With Amazon’s pace of development, I have no doubt the Management Console will probably grow this capability before long, but for now it’s helpful to be able to recover the information.