A company needs a backup plan for EC2 and RDS resources with these retention rules: daily backups kept 6 days, weekly kept 4 weeks, monthly kept 11 months, yearly kept 7 years. Which strategy meets these retention needs with the LEAST administrative effort?

AWS Backup is the most suitable solution because it is a fully managed service designed to centralize and automate backup and restore operations across multiple AWS services, including EC2 and RDS. It directly supports defining backup plans with multiple retention policies (daily, weekly, monthly, yearly) and associating them with resources via tags, minimizing administrative effort. Using Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager (DLM) for EBS snapshots is effective for EC2 but does not cover RDS. While DLM can create multiple schedules, it's not a unified solution for both resource types. Building a Lambda function for backups is a manual, custom solution that requires significant development and maintenance effort, which is contrary to the "least administrative effort" requirement. The last option combines DLM with automated RDS backups, which is better but still less integrated and requires more management than a single AWS Backup plan.