Is the MySQL connector for Python or some equivalent module available in a form I can zip up and included in an AWS Lambda function, or is that just asking for trouble? Apparently Lambda functions written in Node.js can use a builtin library to talk to MySQL on RDS, but I don't see an obvious way to do that in Python.
I wouldn't want to try to install something that takes a long time or requires any assumptions about the underlying operating system. On Windows at least, it's a whole separate installer.
Same question for Java: does this work out of the box, or are there machinations necessary to package a MySQL jar file?