A SysOps administrator must deploy an application instances across 10 EC2 instances that need to be highly available and placed on distinct underlying hardware. Which placement approach satisfies these requirements?

A spread placement group places instances on distinct underlying hardware, ensuring high availability by minimizing the impact of hardware failures. This directly addresses the requirement for instances to be on distinct underlying hardware. Placing them within a single AWS Region is sufficient as the question does not specify multi-region disaster recovery, and placement groups are region-specific constructs. Launching into a cluster placement group would place instances close together on the same underlying hardware to achieve low network latency, which is the opposite of the distinct hardware requirement. Partition placement groups divide instances into logical segments (partitions) that each run on their own set of racks, but a spread placement group offers the highest level of isolation for individual instances. Spreading across multiple AWS Regions is unnecessary and not how placement groups are designed to operate for a single application deployment requiring distinct hardware within a region.