Using IAM Role to allow access to MySQL database on RDS

Question

I have an IAM Role, myRole, for my project. I have an RDS server with a MySQL instance on it. The MySQL instance requires a username and password, however I don't want to pass these in as plaintext via command line, nor store them somewhere for retrieval later.

What I would like to do is somehow use the IAM Role as authentication in order to be able to perform backups, etc.

Is this possible?

Answer 1

It is now possible for MySQL or Amazon Aurora:

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/UserGuide/UsingWithRDS.IAMDBAuth.html

Answer 2

This isn't possible. IAM is for AWS resources. As related to RDS you would use IAM to give someone permission to create or modify an RDS server. The MySQL database engine doesn't know that it is running on AWS and doesn't know anything about IAM roles, so it can't use that for user authentication. You have to stick with username/passwords for authentication to the database.

Update 12/13/2017: You can now use IAM authentication for RDS MySQL and Aurora.