I’ve been using Amazon Web Services (AWS) for a while now, and have recently started using their new product called CloudFormation.  CloudFormation is a must-have solution if you find yourself setting up the same web stack frequently.  First you setup a template for your stack, then you let CloudFormation setup your stack for you.  I’ve now used it several times for WordPress + RDS stacks, and it has saved me a tremendous amount of time!

That said, I don’t like the new example template for WordPress + RDS stack.  I find overly-complicated, because it askes for many parameters which are unnecesary and not straight forward.  If you are having trouble with the new template, I highly recommend trying the old one here.

Tip:  The example WordPress+RDS templates disallow micro RDS instances.  This sucks because it bumps you out of the free usage tier.  If you want to stay in the free, just add db.t1.micro to the allowed values of DBclass in the template.  I already did this for my template I posted above.  For small websites, the db.t1.micro works just fine!