One of the more common struggles I’ve had to assist with in regard to Amazon RDS is enabling binary logging on read replicas, or forming multi-tier replication in instances using version 5.6 or later after seeing that multi-tier replication is not supported in version 5.5 (for a reason that will become clear by the end of this post.)

First off, let’s have a look at the topology that I have in place in my AWS account. As you’ll see below I have a master, blog1, and a read replica that I created via the AWS console called blog2. You’ll also notice that, despite being supported, if I select instance actions while having blog2 highlighted the option to create a read replica is grayed out.

Further, if we use the MySQL CLI to connect to blog2 and check the global variables for log_bin and binlog_format, you’ll see that binary logging is off and binlog_format is set to statement. This is strange considering that the parameter …