What should a solutions architect recommend for this DR plan?
Deploy the application to multiple Availability Zones in us-east-1. Create a resource group in AWS Resource Groups. Turn on automatic failover for the application to use a predefined recovery Region.
Perform a virtual machine (VM) export by using AWS Import/Export on the existing EC2 instances. Copy the exported instances to the destination Region. In the event of a disaster, provision new EC2 instances from the exported EC2 instances.
Create snapshots of all Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volumes that are attached to the EC2 instances in us-east-1. Copy the snapshots to the destination Region. In the event of a disaster, provision new EC2 instances from the EBS snapshots.
Use S3 Cross-Region Replication for the data that is stored in Amazon S3. Create an AWS CloudFormation template for the application with an S3 bucket parameter. In the event of a disaster, deploy the template to the destination Region and specify the local S3 bucket as the parameter.
Explanations:
Deploying to multiple Availability Zones in the same region (us-east-1) does not provide a true cross-region disaster recovery plan. AWS Resource Groups does not have a feature for automatic cross-region failover.
Using AWS Import/Export to perform VM exports is a manual and time-consuming process. It does not support automatic failover and is not ideal for business-critical applications requiring quick DR recovery.
While creating EBS snapshots and copying them to another region provides backup, it does not create a comprehensive DR solution. This approach requires manually provisioning instances, which is slow and complex.
S3 Cross-Region Replication ensures continuous data replication to a secondary region. Using CloudFormation with an S3 bucket parameter enables quick deployment in the event of a disaster. This is a valid DR strategy.
I appraise that the answer is:
Use S3 Cross-Region Replication for the data that is stored in Amazon S3. Create an AWS CloudFormation template for the application with an S3 bucket parameter. In the event of a disaster, deploy the template to the destination Region and specify the local S3 bucket as the parameter.