Ugh. The first thing I'd do is write a preprocessor so I never have to see anything like that. Why not UserData: Base64("dbName=$WordPressDBName\ndbUser=$Wo

Ugh. The first thing I'd do is write a preprocessor so I never have to see anything like that. Why not UserData: Base64("dbName=$WordPressDBName\ndbUser=$WordPressUser\n...") I'll give Amazon the benefit of the doubt and assume they just didn't want to impose a syntax, not that they think humans should be writing JSON like that.