EC2: why are you replicating EC2 instances or AMIs across regions? Why aren't you using build tools to automatically create AMIs for you out of your CI processes?

ELB: Eh? Why do I need ELBs to be multi-regional? I'm a little confused by this on, sorry.

EBS: My systems tend to be stateless, storing as much log, audit, or data in external systems such as RDS, DynamoDB, S3, etc. Storing things on the local system's storage is a bit risky, but if you have to there are disk replication solutions available. EFS comes to mind for making that easier. Backups also come to mind in the event of data loss.

VPC: Why does a VPC need to be cross regional? This one is also lost on me.

RDS: Replication is easy -- it's done for you. Convincing developers their application needs to potentially work with a backup endpoint to the data is harder than data replication problems at times. More often than not, it's simply a case of switching to a read-only mode whilst you recover the write copy of your RDS instance, but this is the role of the developers, not ops.

Lambda, ElastiCache, API Gateway... all these things aren't arguments against my original point: architect correctly. Yes it involves more work (from the developer's perspective, mostly), but more often than not in the event of a failure you're left head and shoulders above your nearest competition and left soaking up the profits as a result.

Based on your responses, however, I think we can safely agree to disagree and move on.

Have a great day! I hope you weren't too badly effected by the S3 outage!

EDIT: typo.