Credentials

Under no circumstances do you want to have credentials hardcoded in your templates or committed to your source code repository. Doing this doesn't just increase the chance your credentials will be stolen, it also reduces the portability of your templates. If your credentials are hardcoded and you need to change them, that obviously requires you to edit your CloudFormation template.

Instead, you should add credentials as parameters in your template. Be sure to use the NoEcho parameter when you do this so that CloudFormation masks the value anywhere the parameters are displayed.