Which solution will meet these requirements MOST cost-effectively?
Use a Multi-AZ deployment of an Amazon RDS for MySQL DB instance with an io2 Block Express EBS volume.
Use a Multi-AZ deployment of an Amazon RDS for MySQL DB instance with a General Purpose SSD (gp2) EBS volume.
Use Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering access tiers.
Use two large EC2 instances to host the database in active-passive mode.
Explanations:
While a Multi-AZ deployment of Amazon RDS for MySQL with io2 Block Express EBS volume provides high availability and IOPS, it may not be the most cost-effective solution due to the higher pricing of io2 Block Express volumes compared to General Purpose SSD volumes.
A Multi-AZ deployment of Amazon RDS for MySQL using a General Purpose SSD (gp2) EBS volume balances cost and performance. The gp2 volume can provide burst performance that meets the 1,000 IOPS requirement, with the added benefit of being a fully managed solution that offers high availability and fault tolerance.
Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering is not suitable for this scenario as it is designed for object storage rather than relational database management, and it does not support IOPS requirements for databases.
Using two large EC2 instances in an active-passive mode for the database would not provide the high availability and fault tolerance that a managed service like Amazon RDS offers. Additionally, it would likely incur higher operational costs and complexity in management.