My AWS Musings

The default time zone of your RDS database instance is UTC. It simply can not be changed.
RDS does not give you super privileges. That is why you won’t be able to change the global time zone by simply executing:

SET GLOBAL time_zone = ‘US/Pacific’;

Amazon’s Relational Database Service (RDS) offers hosted MySQL database in the cloud.
In pre RDS era, you would have fired up an instance, installed MySQL yourself on it, configured an EBS volume so that the database data storage is persistent. You would have setup a cron to snapshot your EBS volume. But RDS saves the headache [...]