Can you restore a MySQL dump file from an S3 bucket to an RDS instance?

I'm investigating running regular MySQL dumps to an S3 bucket as part of a disaster recovery strategy (partly spurred by the current zero cost of inbound data transfer!). In the event of a disaster, I would want to restore the dump file from S3 to a new RDS instance. Despite extensive searching, I can't find any examples of this. Does anyone know if this is possible?

To give a bit of context, it's a 500GB write-heavy read-light 24x7 MySQL database. I'm planning to use MySQL replication to a slave, which we can then take dumps from to send to S3 in case of a host failure (we use the same hosting provider for the replication master and slave, although they are in different data centres).

Solution 1:

You can use the AWS CLI tool and STDIN on the CLI ("-") for this:

mysql -u db_user -ppassword database_name < aws s3 cp s3://mysqldump_bucket_name/mysqldump.sql -

The - part of the aws s3 cp command pipes the output to STDOUT which is read by mysql.

Solution 2:

Currently there's not such feature in RDS, as explained in:

https://forums.aws.amazon.com/message.jspa?messageID=213853

But AWS guys recommend this procedure:

http://aws.amazon.com/articles/2933