The architecture team must get immediate email alerts whenever any new EC2 instances are started in the production AWS account. What should the SysOps administrator implement to meet this requirement?

The correct solution leverages Amazon EventBridge and Amazon SNS for real-time, automated notifications. EventBridge can monitor AWS service events, including EC2 instance launches. By creating a rule that filters for EC2 Instance State-change Notification events where the state is running, EventBridge can detect new instance starts. This rule then targets an SNS topic, which is configured with an email subscription for the architecture team. This setup provides immediate, automated email alerts without requiring custom code on the instances. Embedding a user-data script is inefficient and unreliable; it would require every instance to be launched with this specific script and relies on the instance successfully starting and sending the email, which might fail. An SQS queue is a message queuing service, not a direct notification service for email; while it could store messages, it wouldn't directly send emails to the team without another service (like Lambda) processing the queue. Using Systems Manager to publish events to SNS and then a Lambda to poll the topic is overly complex and introduces unnecessary components; SNS can directly deliver emails.