AWS highly recommends provisioning your compute resources across ___ availability zones.

Provisioning compute resources across multiple availability zones is crucial for achieving high availability and fault tolerance within AWS. Each availability zone (AZ) operates independently and has its own power, cooling, and physical security, meaning that issues in one zone do not affect the others. By distributing resources across multiple AZs, you can ensure that if one zone encounters failures due to hardware issues, network problems, or even natural disasters, your application remains operational because it's still running in one or more other zones.

This strategy minimizes downtime and enhances the resilience of services, allowing for seamless failover and load balancing. In contrast, using a single availability zone poses a risk; if that zone goes down, all resources would be lost. While leveraging all availability zones may seem tempting for scaling, AWS specifically emphasizes the need for a balance by utilizing multiple zones for redundancy and availability while optimizing resource performance and cost.