Does the id Domain\Admin have access to the MySQL database you are trying to connect to?.

Yes, AWS can quickly add up on the bill if it needs to be customized

You can set up a SQL EC2 instance in another AZ or region, copy all the backups to S3(which is universal) and restore the backups.

do you see any errors on the SQL Server logs?

Awesome!!. Thanks for sharing

As Gail mentioned, there is no concept of active/active nodes for database(transactional in nature, not static). One node is always a 'Master' or 'Primary' at a time to capture all...

For you current set up, you can back up the logs to a shared network drive or local. Replace the dropbox with a windows job to transfer files to secondary...

Please refer to the link for 'Considerations for Using Peer-to-Peer Replication'

We recommend that each node use its own distribution database. This eliminates the potential of having a single...

You can also try to rebuild index using TempDB

Set up the profiler to catch events(login, tsql, sp et al) created by the application user. Track each of the activity of the user & determine at what step the...

Have you ever backed up a transaction log for this database?. Sometimes the database is set in 'Full' recovery model by mistake and never backed up the transaction log. If...

Thanks for sharing the steps

For the clear understanding, you are replicating from a database with BLOB data to a reporting database that may not require BLOB data.Is that true?.

Create a domain account that has access to the required databases both in 2008 and 2014 servers.

Execute the SSIS job as the domain account

Sometimes it likes a dot with extension '.trn' or '.bak'