Explanation
To achieve high availability for an application hosted on Amazon EC2 instances, the instances should be deployed across multiple Availability Zones (AZs). Here's why:
Key Concepts:
- Availability Zones (AZs):
- Each AZ is a physically separate data center within an AWS Region
- AZs are designed to be isolated from failures in other AZs
- Deploying across multiple AZs provides fault tolerance and high availability
Why Multiple AZs Provide High Availability:
- Fault Isolation: If one AZ experiences an outage, the application can continue running from other AZs
- Automatic Failover: Load balancers can distribute traffic across instances in multiple AZs
- Redundancy: Data and services are replicated across different physical locations
Why Other Options Are Incorrect:
- Multiple Edge Locations: Edge locations are for content delivery (CloudFront), not for hosting EC2 instances
- Multiple VPCs: While VPCs provide network isolation, they don't inherently provide high availability across different physical locations
- Multiple AWS Accounts: This is for organizational/security separation, not high availability
Best Practice:
For maximum availability, deploy EC2 instances across at least 2-3 Availability Zones and use an Elastic Load Balancer to distribute traffic evenly.