2 AZs vs 3 or more AZs

It's hard to answer this question without your application context and without knowing your reliability expectations - but in general terms, our best practice is to use all Availability Zones in a region.

The more AZs, the smaller the failure domain - and the easier to deal with availability events. A counter point might be on additional costs, like cross-az traffic: so this should be factored in.

I'd say 3 AZs minimum; that way if the worst happens and there's an AZ outage, you still have redundancy. Also the more AZs you use the greater the chance that your auto-scale groups etc will find available capacity when an AZ outage causes a rush for resources.

There is also a cost component to this: If you are running in 3 AZs and one AZ is removed, you only have to accept 50% increase in load on the other 2 AZs. If you run in 2 AZs, then you get 100% load increase, so you have to have a larger capacity and higher cost to absorb the traffic.