Gamache's point is that making your production environment cross-regional means setting up all those things in another region and managing them as well. It's not a tickbox.
Our webservers were hit by this outage. In order to make these cross-regional, I'd need to set up VPCs properly, security groups, instances, datastores (several databases), so on and so forth. I don't store anything on the local disk, but I'm not going to run a server in Europe hitting my db servers in us-east-1. AWS doesn't offer all the databases we use. Cloudformation isn't trivial to use once you get past the tutorial examples either.
Basically, your comment is a version of "you're holding it wrong!"
The US is made up of several regions. You don't have to leave the country to go multi-region, you only need to go west or east from your current location in the US.
Some solutions present more difficulties than others, that's for sure. From the limited information you've given me, your solution is far from being a unique situation that poses many difficulties.
CloudFormation in YAML format is pretty easy. I recommend Terraform, however, which is much nicer again for this kind of stuff. It makes it rather "trivial" to get a multi-region solution in place.
As for the database replication: I highly doubt the solutions you're using don't offer replication, and if they don't, and they're not some very esoteric, highly specialised engines, then I would replace them with something that does.
It reads to me as though your primarily contention point is your databases. Not an easy problem to solve, I'll admit, but not impossible, neither.
Our webservers were hit by this outage. In order to make these cross-regional, I'd need to set up VPCs properly, security groups, instances, datastores (several databases), so on and so forth. I don't store anything on the local disk, but I'm not going to run a server in Europe hitting my db servers in us-east-1. AWS doesn't offer all the databases we use. Cloudformation isn't trivial to use once you get past the tutorial examples either.
Basically, your comment is a version of "you're holding it wrong!"