High availability requires removing single-AZ risk and eliminating manual recovery. The AWS Reliability best practices state to design for multi-AZ and automatic healing: Auto Scaling “helps maintain application availability and allows you to automatically add or remove EC2 instances” (AWS Auto Scaling User Guide). The Reliability Pillar recommends to “distribute workloads across multiple Availability Zones” and to “automate recovery from failure” (AWS Well-Architected Framework – Reliability Pillar). Attaching the Auto Scaling group to an ALB target group enables health-based replacement: instances failing load balancer health checks are replaced and traffic is routed only to healthy targets. Using an AMI in a launch template ensures consistent, repeatable instance configuration (AWS EC2 Launch Templates). Options A and C keep all instances in a single Availability Zone and rely on manual or ad-hoc restarts, which do not meet high-availability or resiliency goals. Option B only scales vertically and adds a restart rule; it neither removes the single-AZ failure domain nor provides automated replacement. Therefore, creating a multi-AZ EC2 Auto Scaling group with a launch template and attaching it to the ALB target group (Option D) is the CloudOps-aligned solution for resilience and business continuity.

References (AWS CloudOps Documents / Study Guide):

• AWS Certified CloudOps Engineer – Associate (SOA-C03) Exam Guide: Domain 2 – Reliability and Business Continuity

• AWS Well-Architected Framework – Reliability Pillar

• Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling User Guide – Health checks and replacement

• Elastic Load Balancing User Guide – Target group health checks and ALB integration

• Amazon EC2 Launch Templates – Reproducible instance configuration