I'm running a webapp from amazon rds with tomcat 7 and spring, which uses hibernate as the persistence layer. The application and utf-8 encoding work properly on localhost, but for some reason when I deploy to amazon, the UTF-8 encoding breaks. I use mysql 5.5.27 on amazon rds and the table that we wish to update has collation set to utf8 - utf8_unicode_ci And in hibernate I have set: < prop key="hibernate.connection.charSet"UTF-8 UTF-8 characters get replaced by ??? and this is of course especially bad for passwords and usernames + email as it basically kills them. Anyone else encountered character encoding breaking when deploying to amazon?