[manyxcxi]

If RDS or other “hard to replicate very quickly during disaster” infra is being run I personally would still have cross A-Z replication at minimum, to reduce network costs I would configure the “other zone” as a backup replica only and not for performance clustering.

With automation we can spin up full new compute stacks, including load balancers and DNS in about 5-10 minutes per “unique” environment configuration.

While it guarantees we could never have a no downtime failover, we’re okay with it and have more than halved our network costs (which admittedly were about number 8 on our AWS bill by cost).