What should a solutions architect recommend?
Create two Amazon EC2 instances to host the web servers behind a load balancer, and then deploy the database on a large instance.
Deploy a load balancer in multiple Availability Zones with an Auto Scaling group for the web servers, and then deploy Amazon RDS in multiple Availability Zones.
Deploy a load balancer in the public subnet with an Auto Scaling group for the web servers, and then deploy the database on an Amazon EC2 instance in the private subnet.
Deploy two web servers with an Auto Scaling group, configure a domain that points to the two web servers, and then deploy a database architecture in multiple Availability Zones.
Explanations:
While creating two EC2 instances behind a load balancer provides some level of high availability, deploying the database on a single large instance does not ensure high availability. If that instance fails, the entire application could go down.
This option ensures high availability by using a load balancer across multiple Availability Zones (AZs) for the web servers, along with Amazon RDS deployed in multiple AZs. This setup allows for automatic failover and redundancy, providing a robust architecture.
This option includes a load balancer and an Auto Scaling group for the web servers, but deploying the database on an EC2 instance in a private subnet does not provide high availability unless configured with additional redundancy (e.g., multi-AZ). It also complicates maintenance compared to using RDS.
Although deploying two web servers with an Auto Scaling group is a good start, simply configuring a domain for these servers does not ensure high availability without a load balancer. Furthermore, the database architecture must also utilize multiple AZs for true high availability, which is not explicitly stated here.
In my opinion, the answer is:
Deploy a load balancer in multiple Availability Zones with an Auto Scaling group for the web servers, and then deploy Amazon RDS in multiple Availability Zones.