A company must run a critical application on AWS that uses Amazon EC2 for its database. The database must be highly available and automatically fail over if a disruptive event occurs. Which solution will meet these requirements?

The correct solution ensures high availability and automatic failover by distributing the database across two EC2 instances in different Availability Zones within the same AWS Region. Configuring them as a cluster with database replication allows one instance to take over seamlessly if the other fails, minimizing downtime. The incorrect options have limitations: Launching one EC2 instance and relying on AMI backups and CloudFormation for recovery introduces significant downtime during a disruptive event, as a new instance needs to be provisioned and data restored. Launching instances in different AWS Regions for primary high availability is generally overkill and adds latency and complexity for a single application's immediate failover, which is better handled within a single region's AZs. Cross-region replication is typically for disaster recovery. Using a single EC2 instance with AMI backups and EC2 automatic recovery only addresses instance-level failures and doesn't provide true high availability for the database itself, as data might not be up-to-date on recovery, and there's still downtime.