[dsl]

I assume you are using the AWS dashboard to manually deploy instances and setting them up by hand? First step is to get your infrastucture to the point where it deploys and scales up and down by itself. Once you manage that, moving to or keeping hot spares in another region is pretty easy.

Look into automated deployment tools like Foreman and configuration management tools like Puppet.

[laszlocph]

You assumed right.

We are learning the hard way that the EC2 Availability Zone separation is not enough, and EC2 is lacking some key features offering multi region tools.

Thanks for the hints, I'm going to check them out.

[druiid]

I echo this... although I don't personally use Foreman. You can do scaling type stuff without the tool and I just use POP (plain old puppet). For me personally it took longer to get on the config-management bandwagon but once I did I have never looked back.

Learning to use Puppet, Chef, Salt or similar will only bring benefits!