Question

I created a CloudFormation stack based on the Drupal template.

That created an EC2 instance which I can see, but it also asked for a MySQL root password during the template set up.

So I expected to see an entry in “Amazon Management Console->Amazon RDS” for that, but I don’t.

Can someone explain where this MySQL database is? And why it’s not under RDS.

Answer 1

Presumably you have selected Drupal Content Management System in the AWS CloudFormation Create New Stack wizard?!

Depending on your region, this template resolves to e.g. https://s3.amazonaws.com/cloudformation-samples-eu-west-1/Drupal_Simple.template, which is accessible via the respective regional endpoint in turn, e.g. https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/cloudformation-samples-eu-west-1/Drupal_Simple.template.

The name already implies this to be a simple approach only, and if you examine the template, you’ll see that it indeed just Install[s] Apache Web Server, MySQL, PHP and Drupal in a single Amazon EC2 instance. Accordingly, the MySQL database is created in the MySQL instance running on the very same EC2 instance you are already seeing and can be accessed there as usual (e.g. via SSH and the MySQL command line tools or the Drupal database connection string targeting localhost:3306).

What you are looking for is available as well though within the collection of AWS CloudFormation Sample Templates, where you can find the following three variations:

• Single EC2 Instance with local MySQL database (pretty similar to the ‘Drupal_Simple.template’)
• Single EC2 Instance web server with Amazon RDS database instance (likely what you expected)
• Highly Available Web Server with Multi-AZ Amazon RDS database instance and using S3 for storing file content (advanced version of what you expected)