Setting up a new AWS RDS database

1. Connect to the AWS Management console (https://console.aws.amazon.com/rds)
2. Click "Launch DB Instances"
3. 
4. 
5. 
6. 
7. Click Launch DB Instance and wait for it to start.
8. Create a disk space alarm:
9. 

Setting Up User Permissions

Setting up user permission on an AWS RDS instances is tricky.  For example, the following GRANT statement will not work of an AWS RDS instances:

GRANT ALL ON *.* TO 'hudsonrelease'@'%';

Results in :

Error Code: 1045
Access denied for user 'platform'@'%' (using password: YES)

The problem is the super users created on our behalf does not have permission to grant access to the 'mysql' database schema.  Therefore, we must run a modified version of the above GRANT statement:

GRANT ALL ON `%`.* TO 'hudsonrelease'@'%';

For a better explanation as to what is going on here see the following: http://www.fidian.com/problems-only-tyler-has/using-grant-all-with-amazons-mysql-rds/