If you run MySQL on Amazon RDS and use passwords, I sure hope you frequently rotate those passwords (among many other security best practices). But if you don’t rotate them, I might know why: it’s quite difficult to set up when you really get into it. It seems easy at first, but if you’ve ever tried you know how quickly it becomes complicated. At least, that was my experience. So to help others overcome the challenges and do frequent password rotation, I wrote up a long read: MySQL Password Rotation with AWS Secrets Manager and Lambda.

Amazon RDS for MySQL uses many default values for system variables, but it also sets a few “sys vars” with different values. As with any database, neither product (MySQL) nor provider (AWS) defaults can best suite all use cases. It’s our responsibility to carefully review and set every important system variable. This is tedious and difficult, but I’ve done it for you. Below are are 21 MySQL 5.7 system variables that I recommend changing by creating a new parameter group.